It was a tremendous blessing for me to be able to attend the sermon seminar organized by the Austin Graduate School of Theology recently. I was blessed to hear from many different speakers but since they had a variety of backgrounds, it would be difficult to find a single theme for the entire seminar.

However, the Dean of Students for AGST, Mark Shipp, would lead the devotional periods we would have either before or after every session and his focus was primarily on I Timothy 4:6-8. There Paul admonishes Timothy to:

put these instructions before the brothers and sisters (and) you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound teaching that you have followed. Have nothing to do with profane myths and old wives’ tales. Train yourself in godliness, for while physical training is of some value, godliness is valuable in every way, holding promise for both the present life and the life to come.

You may notice that the word godliness appears twice in this short passage and it also appears twice in II Peter 1:6-7 which is a portion of the text that has served as the basis for the last several sermons. In fact, godliness is a word that pops up quite frequently in the New Testament but it is also a word that is a difficult to precisely define.

It might be natural to presume that it means to be like God. However, we are told in scripture that there is no one like God and Paul refers to Jesus on one occasion as “the incomparable Christ.” Other attempts to define godliness include terms like pious, righteous, and virtuous which are themselves difficult to absolutely define. I found my favorite attempt to define godliness on the Internet: “the whole of practical piety.” It is my favorite because it is perhaps the least enlightening. I can not conceive of “partial piety”, “impractical piety”, or “partial impractical piety” therefore, saying that godliness is “the whole of practical piety” tells me absolutely nothing.

I am writing this article in a common area outside of the housing AGST provided for my brother and me which contains a translation of the Bible I have not read in a few years, the New Revised Standard Version. It does not use the word godliness in I Peter 1. Instead, it uses “goodness.” This is helpful if only in the sense that it makes the standard Peter is establishing more attainable. I may not be able to ever be like God but I would like to think I can be good and I have a pretty clear idea of what being good is.

Pulling together all of these attempts to define this common but elusive idea of godliness, I think I have arrived at what they are all trying to say. Godliness is not actually being like God but rather being like God wants us to be. Determining what God wants us to be, well, that is what Christians should always be trying to do.

July 16th Kids Day

July 30th Everyone is invited to a cookout at Friends'

Landing. More details will be forthcoming.

Bulletin 2005

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