The Truth We Confess | 1 Timothy 3:14-16
Brian Hedges | December 21, 2025
I want to invite you to turn in Scripture to 1 Timothy 3. We’re going to be reading 1 Timothy 3:14-16.
Let me begin by telling you about an article that C.S. Lewis wrote when he was about 59 years old. The article was called “What Christmas Means to Me,” and in this article, Lewis talks about three different things that all go under the name Christmas. He says, first of all, there is the religious festival, which is important and obligatory for all Christians. Of course, he means the celebration of the nativity and the birth of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It’s what we gather to do during this season of Advent, and again on Christmas Eve, as we celebrate the great truth that the word became flesh, that God was manifested in the flesh, that God became man in the incarnation of the Son. That’s the first meaning of Christmas, the religious meaning.
Secondly, there’s what Lewis calls the popular holiday, which is an occasion “for merrymaking and for hospitality.” And Lewis says that he is a supporter of merrymaking. He says, “I approve of merrymaking, but what I approve much more is people minding their own business.”
That kind of leads him into the third thing that goes under the name Christmas, what he calls “the commercial racket.” This is where Lewis begins to complain a bit about how there are aspects of the Christmas season that are more pain than pleasure, and he especially attacks gift-giving, which he says is often involuntary and involves “the giving of gifts which no mortal would ever buy for himself, gaudy and useless gadgets, novelties because no one was ever fool enough to make their like before.”
There is a little bit of a “bah-humbug” spirit there in C.S. Lewis, but he is talking about something that is real, that I do think all of us have to grapple with during the Christmas season; and that is the difference between the truth that we confess in Christmas and all of the sentiment that sometimes surrounds Christmas. It’s not that the sentiments themselves are wrong. Of course we all should be about peace and goodwill towards men. These are biblical statements, of course. There’s nothing wrong with the decorations, the lights, and the trees, and all of that. There’s much that brings warmth to our hearts.
But it is possible to get caught up into the sentimentality of the season and miss the more fundamental realities of truth. So what I want to do this morning is focus a bit more on the truth that we confess in the Christmas season, understanding that there’s a difference between enjoying Christmas and confessing it. There’s a difference between the experience of warm feelings and the confession of truth that comes from the depth of our hearts. There’s a difference between vague goodwill towards people and a clear claim about what God has done in history to bring peace on earth through the salvation of the Son of God.
The question, you see, is not whether Christmas makes us feel something; the question is whether we actually believe what Christmas proclaims.
This text that we’re going to look at this morning is all about the confession of truth, the proclamation of truth. This is part of our series “When Grace Appeared: Salvation in the Pastoral Letters.” The pastoral letters were Paul’s letters to two young pastors, Timothy and Titus, and today we’re looking at this letter written to Timothy, Timothy who is something like the pastor of the church in Asia Minor, in the city of Ephesus.
We’re looking at a passage here in the middle of the letter, 1 Timothy 3:14-16. Let me read this passage to us this morning. Paul says,
“I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness:
He was manifested in the flesh,
vindicated by the Spirit,
seen by angels,
proclaimed among the nations,
believed on in the world,
taken up in glory.”
This is God’s Word.
The truth we confess—what is the truth that we confess during this Christmas season? To explore that, I want to look at three things this morning:
1. The Reality of Truth
2. The Confession of Truth
3. The Witness to Truth
1. The Reality of Truth
Notice here that Paul says that the church of the living God is “a pillar and a buttress of the truth.” So Paul here is assuming something that is not assumed by many people in our culture today. He is assuming that truth is something which is real, knowable, and revealed; that we actually can know something about objective reality. There is such a thing as truth. And truth in Scripture always corresponds to reality as God has revealed it to us in his word and in his great acts in history, and supremely in his Son Jesus Christ. This truth is something that exists outside of us and presses its claims upon us.
So this is important, because Christianity claims that it’s not simply one truth among many truths, but that it is the truth; that Christianity actually gives us an understanding of the world that God has made, of God himself, and of our place in it, and of what God has done in history to redeem the world. And the issue for us is not whether Christianity is true for you, whereas some other religion might be true for someone else; the issue is whether Christianity is, in fact, the truth.
That’s a controversial claim in our culture, and I want to do just a little bit in the way of apologetics in this first point to help us wrestle with this claim of truth.
We could go about it by using an illustration. This is a common illustration; maybe you’ve heard it before. Sometimes people talk about religions and the different approaches to God with the illustration of a mountain. So here’s this great mountain, a mountain that everyone wants to scale. The mountain represents truth, the mountain represents God; but there are many different paths up the mountain. So you can come up, you know, an easier path on this side of the mountain or maybe you’re on the other side of the mountain and it’s a much steeper scale. This side is more scenic, this side is more rugged. There are many different paths, but they all get you to the summit. The various religions in the world are different paths up the mountain. They all see part of the mountain, but none of them really have a claim on the mountain itself.
That’s the way secularism is in our day today, that’s the way contemporary culture thinks about religion in a pluralistic society. Christianity, then, is one option of many. The question is not whether Christianity is true, objectively speaking, it’s whether it works for you or not. Is it true for you? And maybe Christianity is true for you, and if so, that’s good, be a Christian. But maybe it doesn’t work for someone else, and for them the path is Hinduism or it’s Buddhism or it’s Islam or maybe it’s agnosticism, they don’t really know if there’s a God or not. There are all different approaches, and all of them are equally valid as long as they work for the individual.
That’s kind of the idea that you really have in modern Western culture today. What are we to say to that?
Well, I think one thing we have to say about the illustration is that it does assume that there’s a mountain. It assumes that there’s something that everybody’s trying to get at, and the illustration actually assumes that the person talking about this mountain has an objective view of the mountain, but then just says that the various religions only have one of many different approaches.
It’s also true to say that there are many different starting places in our relationship with God. None of us really start from exactly the same place; some of us start our relationship with God from within the church, from within Christianity. Many people start their relationship with God from outside, and somehow they are drawn in. Maybe they experience a tragic event and that’s what brings them to a crisis where they begin to seek after God and eventually find him. Or maybe they do so in a more intellectual path, through reading and studying philosophy eventually they find their way to the truth about God. It’s true that there are different approaches.
But it is not true to the claims of Christianity to say that Jesus is just one approach to God out of many, because Jesus himself said, “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.”
We might put it like this—if in this illustration the mountain represents God, Christianity’s claim is not simply that Jesus is one path to God out of many; Christianity’s claim is that God has made himself known in Jesus Christ and that the face carved into the side of the mountain is the face of Christ. Jesus is the mountain, Jesus is God incarnate, and to know God is to know Christ. To not know Christ is to not know God.
It’s the reality of truth. Paul assumes this reality when he says that the church is the pillar and the buttress of the truth. And you and I need to reckon with those basic truth claims if we’re to really understand what the whole Christmas season is all about, what we claim when we claim that God became man. The reality of truth.
2. The Confession of Truth
Secondly, we also need to look at the confession of truth. If truth is real and knowable, Christianity shows us how truth has been revealed to us through a series of historical events that are all centered in the person of Jesus Christ. That is exactly what you have in verse 16 with this amazing statement that begins, “Great, we confess, is the mystery of godliness.”
Now, this phrase “we confess” is actually not a verb. It translates a Greek adjective that really carries the idea of certainty. So some translations will say it like this: “Without controversy, great is the mystery of godliness,” or, “Beyond dispute, great is the mystery of godliness.”
Then follows these six statements that even in our Bibles look something like a credal statement. Some of the scholars believe that this may have been an early Christian creed or an early Christian hymn. What Paul is giving us is a series of succinct statements about Christ that define for us some of the basic content of the gospel.
I want us to look at those statements together briefly, all six of them, and then I want to come back and focus on the first with just a little more detail.
John Stott in his commentary points out that these six lines fall into three deliberate couplets, and you can see this on the screen with the underlined words. So just look across the screen and you can see that there’s the flesh and spirit couplet, the angels-nations couplet, and the world-glory couplet. And each one of these are holding together two contrasting realms, so there’s kind of a poetic structure to the passage. But together the six statements tell us the story of Jesus Christ from incarnation to exaltation. It’s showing us what happened in history and the cosmic significance it has for the world.
Let’s just walk through them briefly.
(1) Number one, he says, “He was manifested in the flesh.” This speaks, of course, of the incarnation of Christ. This means that the eternal Son of God became human. He did not merely appear to be human, he actually took on a genuine human body, a genuine human soul, a real human nature. He became flesh.
This is what the apostle John taught in his Gospel in the first chapter, when he said, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father, full of grace and truth.” The Word became flesh, the logos became flesh.
The word, he tells us at the beginning of this chapter, the word is the eternal word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” and it’s through this word that all things were created, nothing that was made was made apart from him, and through this word light has come into the world, and darkness has not overcome the light. And it’s this word—the eternal word, the eternal Son of God—it’s this word that has become flesh and has dwelt among us.
That’s an amazing statement. We’ve already sung about it this morning: “To fulfill the law and prophets to a virgin came the Word, / From a throne of endless glory to a cradle in the dirt.”
It’s the mystery of the incarnation; he was manifested in the flesh.
(2) Secondly, he was vindicated by the Spirit.
Now, you remember that at the end of Jesus’ life, Jesus was actually condemned in the courts of both Pilate and of Herod, and he was crucified as a criminal on a cross. That’s the world’s verdict on Jesus of Nazareth. But Paul says he was vindicated by the Spirit, and I think what this means is that God pronounced a verdict very different from the verdict of the world. He pronounced the verdict of justified, or in the right. It was a vindication of Christ, and he did it through the Spirit. I think this is a reference to the resurrection of Jesus. “He was vindicated by the Spirit.”
I think that because of Romans 1:3-5, where Paul says that God’s Son, who was descended from David according to the flesh, was “declared to be the Son of God through the resurrection from the dead, according to the Spirit of holiness.” Something about the resurrection, done in the power of the Spirit, declared Jesus to be who he said he was. It vindicated his claims. It showed that he really is the Son of God. He really is the Lord. He really is God in the flesh. He’s vindicated by the Spirit.
(3) Then Paul says he was seen by angels. In all the critical moments in the life of Jesus, there were angelic eyewitnesses. He was seen by angels.
Remember his birth in Bethlehem, and the angels who proclaim, “Glory to God in the highest, peace on earth, goodwill towards men”? Remember Jesus and his temptation, sustained by the angels? Remember the empty tomb, when the risen Christ leaves behind an empty tomb, and the women come to the tomb and they encounter angels? They encounter these men that are clothed in these garments of white. “Why are you seeking the living among the dead?” Then Jesus, when he ascends to heaven, and there are angels there, “Why are you gazing into heaven? The same Jesus who has ascended is going to come again in the same manner.” The angels are the eyewitnesses to these crucial events of the gospel.
(4) But he’s not only seen by angels, he is (number four) proclaimed among the nations. This shows us that this series of events that are actually the very embodiment of truth were not meant to remain private and local, but from the very beginning the gospel was to be preached publicly and globally, because the Christ who came came to be the Savior of the world. So he’s preached or proclaimed to the nations and then believed on in the world.
(5) Already, by the time Paul is writing this letter, the gospel has gone to the ends of the earth. The gospel is spreading. It’s not just in Jerusalem, it’s not just in Samaria and Judea; the gospel has gone into Asia Minor. It’s right there in Ephesus, where the people of this city have been in bondage and slavery to idol worship as they worshipped this goddess Artemis and Diana, but now people have begun coming to faith in Jesus Christ. Jesus has been believed on in the world as they have received this gospel.
(6) Then finally, Paul says he was taken up in glory, a clear reference to the ascension and the exaltation of Christ, because the same Jesus who came down in humility has been raised up and has been enthroned in glory. The incarnation led to the cross, to the empty tomb, and then to the throne at the right hand of God.
Now, you take those six lines together and they are giving us the heart of the Christian confession, and it’s all about how God has acted in history in the person of Jesus Christ his Son for our salvation.
You’ve seen the structure. Let’s focus for just a minute now on that first line, “He was manifested in the flesh,” because that’s really foundational for everything else, and that’s really what this season is about. “He was manifested in the flesh.”
This is a significant statement, and this is really what we might call the scandal of the incarnation. I’m drawing the language from Christopher Watkin. He’s written a book that our staff has been reading together this year. The book is called Biblical Critical Theory. It’s really looking at the intersection of Christianity with modern culture, philosophy, pop culture, all kinds of things. And we just recently read the two chapters on the incarnation, and Watkins shows that the incarnation of Christ, in his words, “explodes a bomb under the assumptions of modern culture” in four different ways.
There is, first of all, what he calls the scandal of the historical, because modern culture tends to assume that truth, if it exists, must be ahistorical; that is, not rooted in history, but kind of a vague truth out there that’s equally valid for all times and places, but not at all connected to the events of history. But Christianity claims that Jesus of Nazareth was born at a specific point in history! In fact, the claims of Christianity are so strong that it divides history in half—before Christ, after Christ; or, in more common parlance today, before the common era and after the common era. But the fact remains that it all divides with Jesus, because he comes in the middle of human history, and this figure, this historical figure, is the figure in which truth is revealed.
Modern assumptions are that truth must be universal—kind of abstract, universal, not tied to one culture, one people. But Christianity claims that truth is both particular and material. Particular versus the universal; that is, a particular person, a particular time, a particular place. Jesus of Nazareth, who was born in the first century in Palestine, who spoke Aramaic, who lived for a period of time, who gathered these disciples around him, who spoke and then wrote in a particular language, and there is a historical process that unfolds. It all begins with these concrete events in history.
So the scandal of the historical, the scandal of the particular, and then the scandal of the material, that the word became flesh; that is, a material, embodied, flesh-and-blood human being. Not abstract idea or principle, but a concrete reality.
Then finally, Watkins talks about the scandal of the personal. The assumption of culture is that truth is impersonal, it’s not polluted by human prejudice; but in Christianity, truth is very personal, because it’s all centered in a person, and that person is Jesus Christ.
Listen to how Watkins just presses this point home with what he calls the visceral carnality of the incarnation. The carnality—that means the fleshiness of it, the embodiment of it, the carnality of the incarnation. He says this…maybe this will land with you:
“The flesh Jesus took on was no different than any other human flesh. He did not come as a ghost. He became a human being with a body like yours and mine. One could not have told merely from examining his bodily tissue under a microscope that there was anything different about this man. His heart was like your heart, his lungs like your lungs, his brain like your brain. No doubt he caught colds, he went through teething and growing pains, he got dirt under his fingernails, he sweated in hot weather, and was subject to all the other stresses and strains of embodied individuals.”
That’s what we confess. “He was manifest in the flesh.” That Jesus took human nature—that’s an amazing, amazing statement.
Leslie Newbigin put it well: “The Logos is no longer an idea in the mind of the philosopher; the Logos is the man Jesus who went the way from Bethlehem to Calvary.”
Now, why does that matter? Why spend time talking about the confession of truth? Why the doctrine? Why the apologetics? Why does it matter?
It matters because our salvation hangs on this. “For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven,” as we confess in the Nicene Creed. And it matters because it shows us the kind of God we have and the kind of salvation he brings. If God has truly become flesh, then this God is not distant and abstract and remote; he has, rather, entered into this world to redeem it. And this salvation is not an escape from the material world, it is, rather, God’s work of restoring it. It means that Christmas is not just about the warm feelings and the nostalgia and the goodwill, it is about the decisive acts of God in history. It means that life has conquered death, that light has overcome darkness, that hope has entered into the world, because the word became flesh.
And it means that this God, revealed in the person of Jesus Christ, is not ashamed of our humanity, but instead has taken a human nature unto himself so that he is now able to sympathize with us in our weaknesses. This God is able to understand us in our pain, in our suffering, in our grief, in our fear, in our sorrow. All of the things we go through as human beings, he understands. And he understands not simply as the God who is omniscient and knows everything; he understands because he’s lived the experience.
That’s the scandal, the mystery, and the miracle of the incarnation. “He was manifested in the flesh.”
I love these words from one of the old Advent hymns: “Seek not in courts or palaces, nor royal curtains draw, / But search the stable; see your God extended on the straw.” That’s the kind of God that we serve, and that’s the truth that we confess when we come into the Christmas and the Advent season.
3. The Witness to Truth
So we’ve seen the reality of truth, the confession of truth; number three, the witness to truth. Paul doesn’t stop with what the church believes, he also tells us what the church is for, and you see it in verse 15 when he describes the church as “the household of God, the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth.”
That’s a remarkable description of the church. The church is the pillar and the buttress of the truth. He does not say that the church creates the truth or decides the truth or updates the truth, he says that the truth is there and the church has a role of supporting and holding it up.
What he’s really doing here is he’s using two architectural terms. John Stott brings this out in his commentary.
The first term to consider is this term “buttress,” sometimes translated “foundation.” It’s the idea of that which brings stability to a building, to a structure. Every good building has to have a foundation. If there’s no foundation, the whole thing collapses. So Paul tells us that the church is the foundation or the buttress of the truth. It helps hold the truth up and stabilize it in a world that is awash with all kinds of false teachings and untruths. So it’s a call for the church to hold firm to the truth in its proclamation.
Then there’s this word “pillar.” The word “pillar” refers to a column in a structure that lifts the structure high. Stott brings this out, that when the Ephesians read this—this letter addressed to Timothy, pastoring the church of Ephesus—they no doubt would have thought of the temple of Artemis, which was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. This is a little model of what this temple might have looked like. This is from a miniature park in Istanbul. You can see the various columns and the pillars that hold high the roof of this structure.
Paul is saying that the church has this double responsibility (again, I’m using Stott’s language here) to hold firm the truth as the buttress and to hold high the truth as a pillar. In other words, it’s calling us as the people of God to bear witness to the truth in the world in which we live. That is our role; that is our vocation as the people of God.
So what does that look like in our lives? Let’s just kind of end with some application. What does it look like for us to bear witness to the truth, and specifically the truth that we confess in this Christmas season?
(1) Well, it means first of all that we are to be shaped by these truths. We believe them, and we believe them so strongly that they begin to have an effect in our lives. The incarnation is not just a creed to confess, it gives us a Lord to follow. Throughout Scripture—we see this again and again and again—the incarnation is held forth by the apostles as the model, as the example for us.
Think of Philippians 2.
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”
In the same way you are to humble yourselves and seek not your own interest, but seek the interest of others. That’s living out the truth of the incarnation.
Or think of 2 Corinthians 8, where Paul says, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that we through his poverty might become rich.” This is in the context of a call to give generously to those in need.
In other words, we think about these truths, and if we believe them and confess them and they really grab our hearts, it begins to lead to a different way of living in the world. And that’s what the church is called to be, a counterculture, an alternate city, a visible community that embodies the truths that we confess. This is part of how we bear witness to the truth.
(2) I think we also bear witness to the truth in the Christmas season as we seek to bridge the gap between the sentiment of the season and the truth that really lies at the heart of Christmas. We’re not called to just echo the mood, but actually to show what Christmas is all about.
So think of it this way. We’re surrounded by lights, but we need to bridge the gap to show people that Christ is the true Light of the world. We are in a season where people talk kind of vaguely about the desire for peace, but our call is to bridge the gap and to show that the concrete embodiment of God's peace, of God’s shalom, is through his Son, Jesus Christ, who is the Prince of Peace. We are in a season where there is vague goodwill towards others, but we’re called to bridge the gap and point people to the costly love, revealed in the coming and the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that secures the good of the world for all who will believe in him. We bear witness to the truth when we do that together.
(3) And we bear witness to the truth in both our corporate worship and in our private worship as we center our minds and our hearts on these realities, when we sing not just about the feelings of Christmas, but about Christ himself; when we gather around word and sacrament and say together, “We believe this. We’re confessing that it is true.” We bear witness when we serve in the name of Jesus, not simply doing acts of kindness, but doing so as ambassadors of Christ, so that our acts of service are signs that point to the grace of God that has appeared in Christ in history.
We bear witness when we speak honestly about why it matters. “Christmas is this season. It’s all about love.” Yes. But if you have that conversation with someone, that’s a doorway to another conversation. Yes, Christmas is about love, but it’s about love because “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him would not perish, but have eternal life.”
For some, perhaps this morning, the witness begins by simply believing this for the first time and moving past the sentiment to the reality and to say, “Yes, the reason I celebrate Christmas is because I believe in my heart of hearts that God was manifested in the flesh, in the person, in the work of Jesus Christ, and I’m hanging all of my hopes for salvation and for the world on this truth, on this reality, on this event.”
Brothers and sisters, there are many things that go by the name of Christmas. There is the central reality that we talk about, but there’s the other stuff too. There’s the celebration. There’s the party atmosphere, the Christmas parties. There’s all the sentiments of the season. And yes, there is the “commercial racket.” But there’s only one thing that can bear the weight of our hope, and that is the truth of what God has done through his Son, Jesus Christ.
“Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness: [God] was manifested in the flesh.” This is the truth we confess, this is the grace that has appeared, and this is the Christ whom we adore. Let’s pray together.
Gracious, merciful God, we thank you this morning for the truth of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the truth of the gospel, that because of your great love for humanity, Christ was willing to make such a sacrifice to condescend to our weakness, to take on our flesh, to take on our human nature, so that we could be redeemed.
We thank you, Lord, for every step, from that leap from eternity into time, to the manger in Bethlehem, to the cross of Calvary. Lord, we adore the grace behind it all, and we thank you for the great salvation that we have in Christ.
As we come now to the Lord’s table, we pray that by your Spirit you would draw near to us, that you would unite our hearts together in this common confession of faith and in this common hope in the gospel, that your Spirit would work in our hearts to make these things a reality in our hearts, a reality that affects us in the way we think, the way we feel, the way we live, the way we worship, the way we relate to one another. We pray that you would be honored and glorified in the time of worship that follows now and that our hearts would be helped as we draw near to you through faith in Christ. So, Lord, be with us now, we pray in Jesus’ name and for his sake, amen.
Brian G. Hedges
