Holding fast the faithful word as he hath been taught. — More literally, according to the teaching; but the English version gives the sense clearly and exactly. The elder must, St. Paul says, hold fast the faithful word or saying; or, in other words, must steadily adhere to that Christian doctrine taught by St. Paul and his brother Apostles. So St. Paul pressed on Timothy, the chief presbyter of Ephesus, “to hold the pattern of sound words which thou heardest from me” (2 Timothy 1:13); and again, “But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned, and hast been assured of, knowing of whom thou hast learned them” (2 Timothy 3:14). Here “the faithful saying,” that formulary so common in the Epistles to Timothy and to Titus, and which we have generally explained as including the great Christian watchwords of the faith, echoes probably of sayings of Christ, taken up and expanded by His chosen servants, and then adopted in the various churches and woven into the tapestry of the earliest liturgies — now, possibly, after a form like the “comfortable words” of our Communion Service, now into a creed, now into a hymn, but in one shape or other thoroughly well known and loved in the different congregations — here the faithful word or saying seems to include all the faithful sayings, and denotes generally the teaching of St. Paul and the Apostles.
To exhort and to convince the gainsayers. — Two special purposes are specified for which the “sound doctrine” which the elder will acquire by steadfast application may be used. The first, with the sound, healthy teaching — sound, healthy, practical, compared with that sickly, morbid, and unpractical teaching of those gainsayers of whom he is going to speak — he is to exhort the adversaries; secondly, with the same true words he is to confute their arguments. Chrysostom well remarks “that he who knows not how to contend with adversaries, and is not able to demolish their arguments, is far from the teacher’s chair.”