1 Timothy 4:7Plain English VersionDon’t take any notice of those silly stories that are not true, stories that lie about God. But instead, train yourself to respect God and take notice of him. See the chapter |
We have to remember that God gave that law to punish the people that do bad things, not the people that do good things. That law is there to stop bad people, and cheeky people, and people that forget about God and everything that belongs to God. It is there to stop people that want to kill their own father or mother, and people that want to murder other people.
God shows us something about Jesus that is really true, and nobody can argue with it. He shows us that Jesus is really great, He came in a man’s body for people to see, but the Holy Spirit showed us that he was really from God. And God’s angel messengers saw him too. The people that believed in him told other people everywhere about him. They even went to other countries to tell people about him, and people all over the world believed in him. And God took him up into heaven.
You sometimes hear people say, “If we train our bodies, we will get fit so that we can play sport and live better lives, and that is good for us now. But if we train our spirits to respect God and take notice of him, we will not only live better lives now, but we will live a lot better in the life that will come after we die, just like God promised us. That is a lot better for us.” Well, those words are true, and everybody has to follow that message.
But Timothy, you belong to God. So you’ve got to keep away from all those bad things that I just told you about. Instead, you’ve got to try to do the right thing all the time, and try to do things that make God happy, and try to trust him more, and try to love people better, and try to keep going when things are tough, and try to be easy on other people, not hard on them. Those are the things you have to try to do all the time.
All right, Timothy, God gave you his good message, so you have to look after it properly. Make sure nobody changes it around. There are some people that talk a lot in a stupid way, and they say bad things about God. Don’t listen to them. They might reckon they know all about it, and they might say that you are wrong, but really, they are the ones that are wrong.
Then they keep on arguing with each other. You see, they listened to those wrong teachers and those teachers tricked them. Those wrong teachers made them think the wrong way, so they don’t really know the true message. They think that if they follow God’s way they will get a lot of money, but they are wrong.