Over the last few weeks we've looked at the church's responsibility to Widows, this week I want to turn the corner and look at the widow's responsibility to the church reflected in the same passage. Please open your Bibles to 1 Timothy 5:3-16 where we will see that there is a dual classification of widows in the early church. In verses 3-8 we have the broader category focused intentionally on helping those who cannot help themselves and from verses 9-16 we turn the corner and we see a specialized – sacred ministry of widows in the early church who through taking a personal vow dedicated themselves completely to the Lord Jesus alone.
When we look at this passage we note that it raises the bar a bit. While it is important that we do good to everyone, it is especially vital that Christians help Christians. But there is a clear expectation that Christians be Christlike. A widow who is truly in need, whom the church should assist is a godly widow, it should not be the church's practice to reward godlessness which is why as we look through the perspective of the widow in this passage we see first and foremost that she has fixed her hope on God.

Personal Godliness is Primary (v3-8)

In the text, every Widow must be Godly. Above all we are seeking for faithfulness. There are three general characteristics in view.
The first we see in verse five is that she has “Fixed her hope on God”. Remembering the circumstance of a first century widow was incredibly dire. She had no means of taking care of herself and was thus dependent upon others for her daily needs. Ultimately however a godly woman is one who has fixed her hope on the Living God. She trusts the Lord to take care of her.

Some of the recent advertisements out for a consulting firm use Tiger Woods to highlight their professionalism <show a few of the print adverts>. Tiger Woods is on top of his game. As an athlete he is not only one of the best but one of the most recognizable in terms of excellence.

Any fool can play cow pasture pool - but if you want to golf like Tiger Woods it's going to take discipline and hard work; not to mention an enormous investment of time. That company claims that they know what it takes to be a Tiger. Bully for them. You might want to work on that hook or slice you've been nursing but I've got something more important than your golf swing for you to work on.

Do you have what it takes to be godly?

How many of you have ever suffered from an "earworm" (a song that gets stuck in your head). It's sad to say but I still take a great deal of (wicked?) pleasure in implanting songs into people's minds and then watching them struggle to get rid of it. I've found that it works best with old show-tunes and snippets of songs which are otherwise almost entirely forgotten.

But what if you could put a song in your head that should stay there? One of the methods of the early church was to put doctrine to music so that the hymns they sang were full of meaning. To a certain extent we do the same thing today but not all of our songs are as doctrinally rich.

Before his death in about the year 220 A.D. Clement of Alexandria described the constant worship of Christians this way:

"We cultivate our fields, praising. We sail the seas, humming. Our lives are filled with prayers and praises and Scripture reading before meals and before bed, and even during the night. By this means, we unite ourselves to the heavenly choir."¹

Not much remains of some of those early songs. No doubt the early church sang from the Psalms, but they also began to write new hymns which specifically testified about Jesus. There are a few instances where some of the early hymns of the church made it into