1If ever people in the church there go wrong and you have to straighten them out, be careful to respect them while you do it. If you talk to an old man, don’t talk roughly to him but talk easy to him like as if he is your father. If it is a young man, talk to him like as if he is your brother.
2Or if it is an old woman, talk to her like as if she is your mother. Or if it is a young woman, respect her and talk to her like as if she is your sister.
3If there are any widows in the church that have no family to look after them, the church has to look after them.
4But if a widow has family, like big children or grand-children, these are the ones that have to look after her, not the church. These younger people have to remember that they were kids once, and that old woman looked after them at that time, so now it is their job to look after her. If we do this, God is happy with us.
5But if a widow is all alone, and has no family to look after her, she keeps praying and asking God for whatever she needs. She keeps on praying all the time, and she expects God to take care of her.
6But a widow that doesn’t think about God but only wants to have fun, she might think she is alive, but really, her spirit is dead.
7If people don’t take care of their own family or their own relatives, they are not doing the thing that Jesus wants. They are worse than the people that say they don’t believe in Jesus at all. Tell everybody in the church this message so that other people will not try to blame them.
9So you can make up a list and write down the names of all the widows that the church has to help, and if they get their names on the list they will promise to work for the church. But only put a widow on the list if she is over 60 years old, and if she always stayed with her husband and never cheated on him.
10She has to be the kind of woman that always did good things for people, so now everybody respects her. She has to be a woman that brought her kids up properly. She has to be a woman that always gave strangers food and a place to sleep. She has to be a woman that did things for God’s people, even the dirty jobs. She has to be a woman that always helped people in trouble and did all kinds of good things.
11But if a widow is still a young woman, later she might want to go off and marry somebody, so she will stop doing things for the Jesus. So don’t write her name on that list.
12If she stops working for the church it means that she is breaking her promise to the church, and God might punish her for that.
13Even if she doesn’t marry again she still might get lazy, and just go around from house to house and talk about people, and meddle in things that are none of her business.
14So I’m saying this to young widows. Don’t try to get on to the church’s list, but instead, go ahead and marry somebody, have children, and look after your family. If you do that our enemy will not have any reason to say bad things about us.
15You see, some young widows already went the wrong way. They went away from God and now they follow the boss of the bad spirits, called Satan.
16So if a Christian woman has relatives that are widows, she has to look after them herself. She can’t ask the church to do it. The church can look after those other widows that have no family. They are the ones that really need help.
17Everybody has to respect those people that lead the church properly, and the church has to pay them properly, especially those that work hard to teach God’s word and explain it to people.
18God says, “You have to pay the worker for his work.” God gives us an example of this in his law. We read in God’s book, “If you get an animal to work for you, you have to let that animal eat something when it works.” Well, it is like that too with the church leaders. They work for the church, so the church has to pay them properly.
19Don’t forget that church leaders can go wrong too. But if somebody blames a church leader for something, don’t believe him unless there are 2 or 3 people that tell the same story about that leader. Then you have to find out if that story is true.
20If he really did do something bad, then you have to shame him. You have to talk to him to try to straighten him out, and do it in front of everybody in the church. Then everyone will take notice and be afraid to do bad things themselves.
21Listen, Timothy, God sees everything I’m writing here, and so does Jesus Christ, and so do God’s angel messengers. They are witnesses. So you have to do all these things that I’m telling you now, and while you do them you have to treat everybody the same. You can’t treat your family and friends any better than anybody else.
22If ever you need to pick somebody to be a church leader, pick somebody that has been a Christian for a long time, not somebody that is a new Christian. It is like this. If the one you pick starts to go wrong, everyone will blame you as well as him. So pick somebody that you know is really good, so that you don’t get yourself mixed up with something that is wrong.
23By the way, I know you are often sick in the stomach, so you have to mix a little bit of wine into the water you drink. Don’t just drink water on its own.
24If you need to pick a new leader remember this. There are some people that do bad things out in the open so that we soon hear about it, so we all know that they are no good before we even meet them. But there are also other people that hide the bad things they do so that nobody can see them, and it takes some time before we find out that they are bad people. In the same way some people do good things out in the open so that everybody sees them, while other people hide the good things they do so that nobody can see them. But it doesn’t matter. Sooner or later everybody will find out about them and know that they are good people.
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