Hang on to Your Faith and Conscience.

1 Timothy 1:19-20
19 holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith. 20 Among them are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have handed over to Satan to be taught not to blaspheme.

What is it about humans that we have slip away from something after a while? Anything important we may be able to do for a short amount of time, but when something else, many times less significant, it takes precedence. Something important like exercising can fall through the cracks when you add one little thing onto your day.

The same thing happens with God. We tend to ever so slowly put God on the back burner. That's not such a smart thing to do. In the case of today's scripture, Paul advises Timothy to protect himself from the mistakes of his enemies who have lost, or "shipwrecked" their faith, as it mentions above. Thus, they no longer have a good deal of faith or a good conscience.

Faith lets you put up a fight through the toughest parts of life. If you have a good conscience, it's because you're living truthfully according to faith.

Hymenaeus and Alexander know that God's calling out for them, but they ignore him persistently and stubbornly. How can you reject something that you know is true? How can you reject such a freedom (of grace) just by going against your own conscience? That's what those two men did. As a result, the men were handed over to Satan, without God protecting them. The intentions weren't to destroy the men but to redeem and respect them.

Paul gave Satan these two men in the hopes that they will never blaspheme again because they were going against the truth according to their faith!!! According to Paul, the men will experience misery, but he had the vision of repentance.

“Let us be sure that those who come after will say of us in our time, that in our time we did everything that could be done. We finished the race; we kept them free; we kept the faith.” ~Ronald Reagan