The basis of today's reading is the definition of faithfulness and faith. The apostle tells us about two events in his life - his conversion and his calling. The first happened because God is merciful and forgave Paul for what he did in ignorance. The granting of ministry became possible because, after his conversion, the apostle was faithful to the One who called him.

Thus, the granting of ministry is a visible sign that God has confidence in us. It is easier to believe in our own worthlessness than to realize that even the meager reserves of our faithfulness can be enough for God to entrust us with something very important and fragile. Or, from the other side, when we see a person who in our view is unworthy, yet has nevertheless received such a gift, let us remember that faithfulness - and nothing else - became the reason for that trust.

God entrusts His work to us. And this becomes possible only on the condition that we remain faithful to Him.

In his letter to Timothy, Paul reminds him of the situation that had developed in the Ephesian church. There, as is clear, a tendency toward turning Christianity into a kind of new religion, based on the Torah understood externally and therefore clearly inclined toward legalism, was plainly visible and even growing.

Everything listed by the apostle that interested the newly appeared Ephesian "teachers" and their students at that time quite obviously concerned either the finer points of the text of the sacred books or the details of religious legislation, matters that in the Synagogue were handled only by zealots of the most refined casuistry. It is possible that in this way the freedom received in the Ephesian church was expressed in the lives of those who previously had been forced to be content with secondary and tertiary roles. Indeed, the church community of Ephesus, like that of many other cities, consisted mainly either of Jews or of those Gentiles who already had experience of synagogue life because they had earlier been interested in Judaism (in the Synagogue such Gentiles who believed in the God of Israel were called "God-fearers"). Some of these people may have known Jewish tradition quite well and even explained the Torah themselves to their fellow Gentiles, but in the Synagogue they were not considered rabbis or teachers, since for the Jews they still remained "Gentiles." And now, in the new church community, where Jews no longer had the former exclusive right to teach, these people found themselves precisely as teachers.

The problem, however, was that they were now continuing to teach newly converted Christians the same thing they had previously taught their fellow Gentiles in the Synagogue: the Jewish religion as they themselves understood it. The Church, strictly speaking, did not need this: Christianity is not a religion, and there is no special need to train Christians in any religious tradition whatever. Meanwhile, the Ephesian "teachers" were not only engaged in such teaching but, apparently, considered it fundamentally important and absolutely necessary for every Christian. It is this misunderstanding that Paul asks his disciple to notice.

As he begins his letter to Timothy, Paul mentions certain people who, judging from his words, were trying in the church at Ephesus to act as teachers of the Torah while, in essence, not understanding what the Torah is and why it was given by God to His people (vv. 3-7). It is hard to say exactly which "genealogies" the apostle mentions, but judging by the context, one can suppose that he is speaking about the genealogies of the Pentateuch, which occur there in great number. Considering that some of them are legendary, while the history of others is lost in the depth of the ages, it is no surprise that endless disputes, judging from Paul's words, were stirred up by discussion of this topic. Meanwhile, according to the apostle's testimony, the Torah is needed not for exercises in theology and not for discussions that in the end give no one anything spiritually, only arousing passions and perhaps even quarrels. Paul once again reminds us that the Torah is the instrument of a practitioner, not a theorist, a practitioner who needs a spiritual compass on the road to the Kingdom. It is not by chance that he says the Torah is needed not by the righteous person but by the sinner (vv. 8-11).

Of course, in this case he is speaking only about one aspect of the Torah, connected with the knowledge of one's own sinfulness; the apostle does not consider its other aspects. But, as we can see, without fully recognizing and grasping this function of the Torah, it was impossible to move further; it was impossible to speak about the inner Torah with those for whom the importance of keeping the commandments was not obvious. Meanwhile, in the church at Ephesus there were, apparently, certain "theorists" of the Torah who, perhaps having heard something about the inner Torah and lofty theological matters, decided that perfection in spiritual life could be attained by theoretically studying what, without practice, is not assimilated and brings no benefit. And Paul, as we can see, calls those carried away by this kind of "spiritual" theorizing to leave their theories behind and finally learn to keep the commandments, without which one cannot enter the Kingdom. And life itself in the Kingdom is not theory but practice. Practice which, like all real life, cannot be reduced to any theoretical concepts, however clever.