Title: The Importance of Opposing False Teaching
Scripture: 1 Timothy 1:3-7
Speaker: Nate Pickowicz
Well, last, we could begin a new study into Paul's first letter to Timothy. I've chosen to call this study, and I title each sermon series as we go through. This one is called True Christian Ministry.
I believe it summarizes what Paul intends to cover in the letter. Well, why did I choose the title specifically this way? What is true Christian ministry actually even mean? Well, for starters, I want to focus on what is true and not just biblical truth, but the genuineness of how that is applied and lived out. We are people of truth.
We care about truth. There are many who are many things that find their way into churches which are biblically not true. There are times when doctrines will come in or practices or rituals that are not true to Scripture.
And we want to focus on that which is true. Next, we want to focus on that which is Christian, both Christianity itself, the faith, but also the Christ of Christianity. We're not interested in considering or teaching worldly philosophies or general spirituality.
It's very popular to grab a social construct or a theoretical construct or a philosophical construct from the world and try to filter it through and evaluate it. One example that exists in the blogosphere is when they'll take a popular movie and try to find gospel themes in it. If I have to read another one of those, the gospel themes in Superman posts, I'm going to swallow my tongue.
I mean, there's just no purpose of it. But you'll go to churches, you'll click online, and you'll see an attempt to grab things from the world and sort of filter it through Christianity. There is no point in that.
This is not about being religious. It's not about finding truth in random places. This is about talking about Christianity, expounding and explaining Christianity.
We are committed to preaching the triune God of Scripture, but specifically the biblical religion of Jesus Christ. Christianity. Finally, the word ministry.
Ministry. Many things are bound up in this word oftentimes, but the essence of ministry is service. Service.
And more specifically, serving God through serving His people. That is ministry. And the preeminent way we do this is by teaching God's Word.
Because by teaching God's Word, we are able to, as Paul says, further the administration of God, which is by faith. That's what Paul was focused on. That's what we're going to focus on.
That's what we have been focused on. It's ministering God's faithful precepts. Specifically, we want to devote ourselves to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
We want to devote ourselves to sound doctrine, that which is found in Scripture. And so it is the church's primary responsibility to learn these things. It is the church's leadership's responsibility to teach these things.
However, this involves simply or more than simply teaching what is true, but also it involves correcting that which is false. In fact, in Titus 1.9, which is part of what we know as the pastoral epistles, 1 and 2 Timothy and Titus, but Titus 1.9, Paul asserts that Christian leaders must be those who hold fast the faithful word, which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able to both exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict. Exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict.
Biblical shepherding involves more than teaching the truth and refuting the false, but it is certainly no less than that. And few people did this more faithfully than the Apostle Paul. And frankly, at the end of his three year stint in the city of Ephesus in the early 50s, in the early first century here, he addressed the Ephesian elders.
And actually, we read about this in Acts chapter 20. He's rounding out the end of his three year ministry. He meets with the elders right before he gets onto a ship and departs.
And we read about some of his final words here in Acts 20, 25. He tells the Ephesian elders, And now behold, I know that all of you among whom I went about preaching the kingdom will no longer see my face. He says, this is the last time some of you guys are going to ever see me again.
Verse 26, Therefore, I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of all men, for I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole purpose of God. Be on guard for yourselves and for all the flock, among which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to shepherd the church of God, which he purchased with his own blood. I know that after my departure, savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock and from among your own selves, men will arise speaking perverse things to draw away the disciples after them.
Therefore, be on alert. Remembering that day and night for a period of three years, I did not cease to admonish each one with tears. And now I commend you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance among all those who are being sanctified.
He says a few more things and then they all gather around him. They cry. He feels the tears in the back of his neck.
They hug him. They cry. And then he gets on a ship and departs to go somewhere else.
But Paul had been teaching God's word. He'd been teaching them publicly in the synagogue and also from house to house. He had been declaring to them the whole counsel of God.
The whole counsel of God. Expository preaching works verse by verse through a text. But you grab other texts from other parts of Scripture that explain and apply and synthesize doctrine.
I don't oftentimes go to outside sources. I consult commentaries. But the the meat and the substance of the ministry here is the word of God.
The whole counsel of God in any part of the Scripture that's going to help illuminate and elucidate what's here. I want to grab that and use that. I want to declare to you as much of the word of God as possible in any given setting.
But Paul did this faithfully, thoroughly, passionately. And he did so with a clear conscience because he knew that there was coming a time when false teachers, savage wolves, as he calls them, would arise. And he says not necessarily from out there, but savage wolves would arise from within the church and they would pervert true Christian ministry.
This happens in the early 50s where Paul says this, but then 10 years later, 10 years later. These wolves would come in and wreak havoc on the Ephesian church. But thankfully, Paul's greatest disciple is there to oppose them.
Turn to First Timothy, chapter one, if you're not already there in your scriptures. First Timothy, chapter one. The apostle Paul has penned this very personal letter to his young disciple, Timothy, really for one purpose.
Chapter three, verse 15, so that you will know how one ought to conduct himself in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and support of the truth. So First Timothy was essentially written for the benefit of the household of God. It's for the church.
It's called a pastoral epistle, meaning it's being written from a pastor to a pastor. And there's lots about pastoral ministry. But the the audience that was meant to receive this ultimately is the church.
The pastoral epistles are written for the church. And so that's what that's what he's doing. Timothy, however, he has his own purpose for why he's in Ephesus.
He has a reason. Why is he there at all, even in the first place? After all, Timothy, like Paul, is a missionary. He's an evangelist.
Why did he remain in one place? Why did he stay in Ephesus? The answer is because the church in Ephesus was in danger of being overrun by false teachers, by wolves who would not spare the flock and that imagery of a wolf that will not spare the flock. Think about this, an actual flock of sheep. Imagine a wolf not coming and just snatching one, but going through and just wreaking havoc and attacking and killing every single sheep in the fold.
That's the idea. That's how false teachers work. They don't just grab one person and try to pull them away.
They want to pervert the entire thing. That's always the risk. That's always the danger.
But Paul says, starting in chapter one, verse three, he tells Timothy, as I urged you upon my departure from Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor pay attention to myths and endless genealogies which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God, which is by faith. The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. For some men straying from these things have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions.
So this is the first order of business and other letters to different churches. He goes on an elongated prayer of Thanksgiving and exhortation. He tells them how much he loves them, how much he misses them.
There are other ways that Paul opens letters to churches. But here he says, this is to Timothy, my true child of faith. Grace and peace to you.
All right, let's get to business. And he goes right in for the main thing here. Is the greatest need in the church then and the greatest need in the church today, which is often lacking, is to deal with contending for the faith and opposing error.
We are a culture that is rife with error. Truth is relative in our postmodern culture, even though that is not true at all, but that's how we treat truth. The Paul reminds Timothy that they'd already been in a previous discussion about this very issue.
He says, as I urged you to do upon my my departure from Macedonia. Now, we don't know when his departure to Macedonia took place. There's several times in Scripture where Paul is talking about ministering in the region of Macedonia.
But whatever it was, Timothy would have remembered the conversation. Well, how do we know that he remembered it? Well, because Paul references, he says, the reason that I told you to remain was so that you could instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrine. So he's reminding him, remember the conversation we had where I told you to stay here and do this? I'm reminding you of this in the letter.
So Timothy would have known without a shadow of a doubt why he was there. Timothy, who is really a mini Paul, has been left behind in Ephesus for the purpose of guarding the church against false doctrine. Guarding the church.
That is a key component of spiritual leadership. Believe it or not, pastors and elders, we don't just sit in rooms and make decisions about things. We don't just talk about the building and the things we'd like to do in the dreams of the future.
I don't just sit around and read theological books and think theological thoughts in, you know, abstraction. There's there is a greater charge for spiritual leadership, and that is to teach the truth and guard against error. I spent a lot of my day learning the scriptures, learning doctrine, but I also spend a good portion of my time trying to pay attention to what's going on in the world.
I look at the things that you're reading, the things that you're watching. I hear what is going on. I try to keep a pulse on what's happening because I want to be attentive to what is creeping in.
Now, there are some errors that exist out in the world that really don't affect this church very much. False teachers that I know that none of you listen to. And that's fine.
That's good. But when things start to to push in, press in on the walls of this church, I pay attention. And every pastor, every elder, every teacher should be paying attention.
And so here in verses three through seven, Paul provides here a sample of the kinds of errors encountered in Ephesus. But also this can be very helpful and instructive for us as we consider the kinds of things to be watching out for. And so let's look at them one by one.
There are four here today that I'm going to point to. Number one is the error of false doctrine. Verse three, he says, as I urged you upon my departure from Macedonia, remain on in Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines.
Now, the certain men, Paul doesn't name who the men are here. Certainly the certain men refers to those who are within the church. Many scholars believe that these group of teachers, these certain men who are teaching error were actually some of the church's elders, but we can't be sure of that.
But there are some clues, I think, that lead us to that that notion. One of the clues would be that he spends a good chunk of chapter three dealing with the qualifications of elders. And then back forward in chapter five, he talks about the necessity of correcting elders who have gone astray.
So, again, we do have some clues about this. Paul does name two men in verse 20. He names Hymenaeus and Alexander, who have shipwrecked their faith.
Those certainly could be some of these certain men. But again, we cannot be sure. Yet for those who are teaching these errors, Paul tells Timothy to instruct them not to do so.
Now, this word instruct here, it doesn't mean simply teach. Certainly that includes the concept of teaching. But the Greek word is parangelo, which refers to a charge or a directive or more stringently a command.
Many scholars have sort of seen this as commandment or a commanding. The virtue of Paul's designated apostolic authority in verse one is to be used by Timothy to command these certain men to charge them and to rebuke them to stop teaching error. Similarly, Paul tells Titus to refute teachers on Crete.
He says there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party who must be silenced because they're upsetting whole families. And he says for this cause, reprove them severely so that they might be sound in the faith. Titus 1.13. I don't take that lightly.
I don't think any teacher, elder, pastor, shepherd takes that lightly. I remember there was one specific time. I won't give specific situation or names or anything like that, but I was teaching a group of men and there was a gentleman that was in that group.
And it started off by simply asking questions about the nature, the personhood of Jesus Christ. And, you know, you always want to be entertaining questions and answers. And but at a certain point during the course of several weeks of discussion, it became apparent that this gentleman was trying to sow seeds of doubt and argue not just for the sake of questioning, but attack and argue against the nature, the deity of Christ.
And at a certain point during the course of the discussion, I told the man he was going to shut his mouth. I said, this this conversation is over. This is the doctrine of the church.
This is this is Christianity. If you don't believe this about Jesus Christ, you're not a Christian. And so from this point on, we're not going to talk about this anymore.
Come see me after. But this this conversation is over and he stopped talking. Now, I don't I'm not saying that to brag or boast.
I'm saying there is a certain point when heresy cannot be tolerated inside the walls of the church. Your job and my job here, Titus one 13 is to reprove them severely. What's the point? Is it just to pound your chest and say, oh, I'm going to tell you what to do? No, it's so that the church is protected and so that they might be sound in the faith.
You're telling them to stop believing lies and believe truth. It's actually a loving thing. But Paul says to instruct them, to command them not to teach strange doctrines.
This word here is a compound word hetero didaskalia. It literally means different doctrine or different teaching, false teaching heresy. He's not talking about secondary doctrine.
There are some things, peripheral issues, small matters that we can debate. There are lots of things that arise in Scripture that there is not consensus on. There are minor points of doctrine that we're allowed to have discussion about.
I know that there are many doctrines that some of you probably see differently than I do. And for those smaller matters, that's actually OK. Of course, I think I'm right, because if I didn't think I was right, I wouldn't be teaching certain things.
But to recognize, to have the humility among all of us to say, no, there are certain things that are a little bit confusing or a little bit mysterious. And those are things that we can talk about. And that's OK, as long as we're growing in a healthy way, submitting ourself to Scripture.
But there are matters of core Christianity, matters of spiritual life and death that we're not going to waffle on and that we're going to stand firm on until the very end. We see an example of this kind of thing in Galatians chapter one. Turn to Galatians chapter one.
Paul is addressing the church in Galatia, which had been overrun by Jewish legalists who were denying the doctrine of justification by faith alone. The problem would actually get so bad that even Barnabas and Peter, the apostle Peter, got swept up in it to the point where Paul had to confront Peter publicly. That's how bad it got.
But in the opening verses of Galatians chapter one, Paul gets deadly serious about the consequences of false gospel. He says in chapter one, verse six to the church, he says, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is not really another. There are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.
Then he says this in verse eight. But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel, contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. As we've said before, so I say now again, if any man is preaching to you a gospel, contrary to what you received, he is to be accursed.
For am I now seeking the favor of men or of God, or am I striving to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a bondservant of Christ. Paul says, I don't care one lick what anybody thinks of me. I don't care if an apostle comes to you.
I don't care if the clouds part and an angel comes down from heaven and says, oh, that's not the gospel. This is the gospel, because Paul knows he has apostolic ministry, apostolic authority handed to him by Jesus Christ himself. If anyone preaches a different gospel, and in Paul's context here, he's talking about the saving gospel of justification by faith alone in Christ, that we are justified, declared righteous by God on the basis of faith in the sacrificial atoning death of Jesus Christ on the cross.
If anyone teaches anything divergent from that, if they try to distort the message, alter the message, confuse the message, they are accursed. So here's the problem. If a person does not believe the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, they're condemned.
The Bible says they're condemned. You cannot be saved through a message of works. Remember, it's life or death.
That's how serious this stuff is. We cannot play fast and loose with essential Christian doctrine. False teaching damages people's faith, and it leads them to hell because they never find forgiveness and life in Jesus Christ.
And so Paul, along with Timothy and every other church leader in the world, is responsible to refute false doctrine, to oppose false doctrine, to correct false doctrine, and to command false teachers to shut their mouths. Why? Because false doctrine, it damns both the teacher and the hearer. And Scripture is very clear that it must be stopped.
And so that's what Paul tells Timothy to focus on, is you instruct, you command these men not to teach doctrines that are strange, different, outside of orthodoxy. But then Paul also exhorts Timothy to address a second thing. Number two, go back to your text in 1 Timothy.
The second thing he addresses is, number two, speculative theories. What's that? Well, not only was Timothy to instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, he was also told not to allow people, verse 4, to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies which give rise to mere speculation rather than the furthering of the administration of God which is by faith. See, the goal of ministry, the goal of Christian ministry, the reason why we're here together, why we gather, why we learn, the whole point is to further the gospel and biblical stewardship that has been entrusted to us by God.
There is a core, a bounds of orthodoxy, a deposit of truth, as Paul says to Timothy later on, there is a deposit of truth that must be grasped, understood, and then given forth. I told a brother this week that the whole job of the Christian relay is to grasp truth and then pass it along. So you're either grasping or passing, one of the two.
So that's the goal, is to grab this truth and then give that to those who need to hear it. But what is the core of that essential truth? Again, it is the saving gospel and the truths that are found in Scripture. But there are those who only ever seem to pay attention to speculative theories.
This Greek word for pay attention is literally to be devoted to. They're obsessed with. All their mind, all their time is focused on speculative theories.
So what exactly is this? Well, first, Paul refers to myths. Myths. In the most general sense, a myth is a belief or a story that is not based in truth.
It's a belief or a story that's not based in truth. Titus 1.14 refers to religious people, even on Crete, who are paying attention to Jewish myths. So in that specific context, it seems to be that there were those who were reading the Old Testament Scriptures and deriving stories and myths and tales from the truth of Scripture, but the myths were false.
And there's all kinds of those things today. There are those who will grab things from the Bible, usually they're obscure passages in Scripture or debated verses in Scripture, and they'll spin out something completely off the rails, and they'll focus on that. And I was chewing on, how do I apply this? I was chewing on examples of that this week.
And that sends you down the rabbit hole, let me just tell you. I was thinking about one, I remember reading about this. I've seen this all over the internet recently.
It's this controversy about the Nephilim. The Nephilim. This is mentioned only briefly in Genesis 6.4, but this has taken the internet by storm.
Questions about ancient giants and skeletons found, and what does that mean? And people go right down the rabbit hole with this stuff. But I want to note here that these kinds of discussions, they never lead anyone to a greater understanding of Christian doctrine. They don't further the administration of God, which is by faith.
Now, some of this stuff is interesting, it's fascinating of course. It's fun to think about what could be. But here's the thing, nobody grows.
No one is edified. Nobody is sanctified. Rather, Paul says, it gives rise to mere speculation and uncertainty.
You spend all your time speculating, and you're just not sure about the bottom of it. There's a danger in that. So we're exhorted not to do that.
The second one he says here is endless genealogies. Does that mean that Ancestry.com is a bad thing? No, he's not talking about that. What is this genealogy, this error of genealogy? Well, there's been a lot of discussions and the commentaries about what is the nature of this genealogy here.
What most scholars agree on is that Paul's referring to an old Jewish practice of reading the Old Testament, specifically the genealogies listed in the Old Testament, and concocting stories and tales based on the genealogies specifically of the patriarchs. One commentator I read this week talked about a practice where they would invent names, myths and names of the children of Adam and Eve or the family of Enoch or the extended family of Noah, and they would weave these tales and build a whole narrative around these children of Noah and children of Enoch and so on and so forth. And if you don't know what I'm talking about, well, join me in that, because I don't even understand these things either.
You read some of this stuff and you're like, and I go to my Bible and I'm like, what are they talking about? And it's nothing. It is myths and tales based on stories that are invented. It is tradition, it's folklore.
Again, this is speculation upon speculation, and Paul says it's endless. It just keeps on going. It never stops.
But there's all kinds of things that we do like that even today. I think about the bottomless pit of modern conspiracy theories. I mean, dare I elucidate? I mean, video upon video about flat earth.
Let me just tell you, it's so popular. There are flat earthers around the globe. They're everywhere.
The identity of Antichrist. Oh, Bill Gates is the Antichrist. Okay, how can you even fathom even any of these things? The mark of the beast, identifying the mark of the beast.
Looking for prophetic fulfillment in modern day thinking, oh, this happens in this country. This happens in this country. That must mean this.
That must mean this. And you chase your tail, trying to grasp at some kind of truth that may be on the fringes of doctrine. But the problem with this is that you're not understanding what is clear in the Word of God.
There is so much that is clear in this Bible, and yet we don't pay attention to it. Let me exhort you, learn this first. And once you've mastered this, go chase your tail.
But the problem, and I don't mean to be appearing to be angry here, but it's a burning passion. We don't know the Word of God. We are the most biblically illiterate society in the history of the Christian church.
This is to our shame. I read church history. Children at 10 and 12 years old, they knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.
They read 10 chapters of Scripture a day. They went to school. They went to college at 14.
They learned this. They memorized whole chunks of Scripture, and they understood doctrine. We don't do that anymore.
Why? Well, because no one else does. So what? Why don't we do it? Learn your Bible. Learn doctrine.
Study the Word of God. Ingest it. Meditate on it.
Ponder the deep truths of Scripture. Ponder the glory of Christ. We sang about Him this morning.
Ponder the majesty, the wonder, the brilliance of Jesus. You could spend a lifetime learning Christ alone and never exhaust Him and never be exhausted by the study. Again, conspiracy theories.
And some might say, well, some of that's true. All right. But how has chasing a bottomless pit of conspiracy theory or myths or whatever it may be, speculation, how has that helped you understand your Bible? How has that helped you grow your relationship with Jesus? I would suspect that it has not done any of those things for you.
It will only lead to speculation. And let me just tell you, let me tip the hand here. Speculation is a tactic of the enemy to bring about confusion.
If Satan can get us chasing Frisbees all day long, we're not focused. If he can get us on YouTube for 10 hours a week, that's 10 hours we're not spending in our Bible. If he can distract us away from truth, he's winning.
And yet in 2 Timothy 3, 7, it warns about those who are always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. We chase and chase and chase and don't land. That's wrong.
It's error. It's folly. Later on, 2 Timothy 2, 23, Paul warns Timothy to refuse foolish and ignorant speculations knowing that they produce quarrels.
This stuff actually divides and people fight about this stuff. There are online groups dedicated to things like this and people just sit around and they fight with each other all day. Myths, genealogies, ignorant speculations, or 1 Timothy 4, 7, he says, have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women.
What's that? Old wives tales. Paul says, don't do it. Just don't even engage with it.
The goal of our learning is not to chase strange doctrines, myths, speculations. What is the goal? The goal is to further God's administration, which is by faith. The goal is to learn God and help people grow in their faith.
I want you, you to grow. I want your faith to become strong. I want you to know God's Word to the point where God's Word is the thing that is speaking to you and replacing the thoughts in your mind that are being given to you either by your sinful flesh or by the enemy.
Where the voice in your head is not the flesh, not the world, not the devil, but the voice in your mind and in your heart is God's Word. As Charles Spurgeon said about John Bunyan, you cut him anywhere, he bleeds Bibline. The Bible was in his blood.
What about us? Is that us? Are we a walking Bible? Do we think God's thoughts after Him? Do we further the administration of God, which is by faith? That's the goal. Brothers and sisters, I want that for you. I want you to know God.
I want you to know His Word. It keeps me up at night. All of you are heavy on my heart all the time.
Not because I'm worried about what's going to happen to you. You belong to Christ. But like Paul says, I have the constant, he says, I'm in agony until Christ is formed in you.
I get it, Paul. Because I'm in agony that I want Christ to be formed in me too. Why am I not farther along in the faith? That bothers me, that keeps me up at night too.
Now, the goal is not anxiety, but the goal is are we chasing this? Are we growing? Do you love Jesus more today than you did six months ago or a year ago? Do you understand God's Word more now today than you did five years ago? Are you learning, are you adding to your faith? Now, Paul doesn't do this. He doesn't go after those who are teaching myths and genealogies and strange doctors. He doesn't do it because he's mean-spirited.
I want you to note that. And that's my goal is not to stand up here and just slap you all in the face for the things that you're doing wrong. Look at verse five.
The goal of our instruction, the word instruction here, it's the same word as before, parengello. He says the goal of our instruction is love. Paul was refuting this stuff because of love.
He says the goal of this instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. The goal of dealing with error, calling out error, opposing those who teach error, is because you love God, you love His Word, and you love His people. It's a loving thing to do to correct away from error.
And so I stand here today loving you. I love you. Every single one of you, I love all of you.
And Paul says I can say this with a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Now, I intend to cover this verse a lot more in depth next week, but I want you to notice the stark contrast here. The contrast between strange, speculative, confusing myths and faithful, loving, sound Christian doctrine.
Paul continues in verse six, building on the consequences of ignoring faith and love. In verse six, he says, for some men straying from these things have turned aside to fruitless discussion. Again, some men, he says, certainly those he's warning Timothy about in verse three.
He says the men within the church who are causing trouble, some men are straying from these things. They're straying away from love. They're straying away from a pure heart.
They don't have a pure heart when they teach a false doctrine. They don't have a clear conscience when they're teaching heresy. They don't have a sincere faith when they're teaching error.
The same men who swerve from what God desires, he says, they turn aside to fruitless discussion. That's number three, number three. Fruitless discussion, fruitless discussion.
The Greek is metaiologia, literally means meaningless talk or babble or empty chatter. What is this? Well, 2 Timothy 2.16 refers to worldly and empty chatter that leads to further ungodliness. There is a kind of chatter that we can engage in that will ultimately lead to a lack of godliness.
It's one thing to joke around. I love to joke and tease. I tease a lot of you.
It's fun to have fun, that's good. One of my pastors growing up said it's not as important to be serious as long as you're serious about what's important. There's some truth to that.
So it's not talking about having fun and being a little silly in good-natured fellowship. That's not the point. He's talking about, again, 2.16, worldly and empty chatter that leads to ungodliness.
Or he says earlier in chapter two, verse 14, he warns against listening to those who wrangle about words which is useless and leads to the ruin of the hearer. It's listening to the words associated with those who engage in fruitless and useless and empty talk. It's when you're talking about spiritual matters or even non-spiritual matters, and you're just going around in circles, and you're wrangling over phraseology and terms and this and that, and you're dancing in circles to the point where you're not actually getting anywhere.
And you'll sit there for two hours, and you'll talk, and you're like, what are we even talking about? And all it does, Paul says, is lead to ungodliness. Furthermore, not only ungodliness, but it also ruins people. It ruins the hearer, Paul says.
Well, how so? Well, because if you can become distracted and captivated by useless and inane chatter, you know what happens to your mind and heart? They become undisciplined. Your mind becomes fleshly. Your mind becomes selfish.
It becomes useless. And then what happens to your spiritual disciplines? What happens to your prayer life? What happens to your Christian fellowship, the nature of your fellowship? What happens to godly obedience and service and worship? All those things began to degrade. You get together with a Christian fellowship group, say it's a Bible study, and you start spouting inane mythology and chatter and uselessness, it degrades the entire thing.
I've led Bible studies where a person gets on a hobby horse and they go down a rabbit hole, and at a certain point, it's like, if I don't rein this back in, we're gonna completely fall apart. And so there's a gentle way, I believe, to steer folks away from that. Sometimes you just say, hey, just stop talking.
I mean, maybe I don't do that, but maybe I should do that. Romans 12, two. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.
See, the way that we're conformed to the world is by allowing ourselves to be turned aside to fruitless discussion. To be conformed to thinking about myths and speculation and worldly and empty chatter. To be talking about what's on TV, the latest news, the latest gossip, the latest celebrity gossip, the latest whatever, it doesn't even matter.
Just allowing yourself to be so caught up with worldly and empty chatter that you lose it. You lose your focus. You are not being renewed in your mind.
Titus 3.9, again, I'm just pulling, these are verses out of the Scriptures here. Boom, boom, boom, one after another. Titus 3.9, avoid foolish controversies and genealogies, there's that word again, and strife and disputes about the law for they are unprofitable and worthless.
Instead, beloved, be transformed by the renewing of your mind in God's truth. Renew your mind. Devote yourself to Scripture.
Get into God's Word daily. Read, reread, pray, think through what God is teaching you. How is God convicting you of sin? How is God exhorting you in righteousness? How is God comforting you? How is He lifting your spirits? How is He educating you? How is He teaching you about Himself? Renew, renew, renew.
And I would even exhort you, do it first thing in the morning. And you say, well, I'm more of a night person. That's okay.
Do it before you go to bed too. But I'm telling you, if you start your day unarmed with God's Word, it's going to be a harder day. I know the days that I miss it, if I don't have time in God's Word, it always comes out in my day.
I'm always turned around. But when you start your day with God's Word, you have some armor that you can put on. Be transformed by renewing your mind.
And Christian leaders, pastors, elders have the responsibility of teaching the church and steering the church away from fruitless discussion. Of course, there's one other aspect to those who try to steer the church away from truth, and that's number four, uninformed teaching. Uninformed teaching.
Some of these men, Paul adds in verse seven, are wanting to be teachers of the law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions. See, here we have an element of pride and selfish ambition. Now, it's good to want to teach God's Word.
I want to make that very clear. In fact, we need more faithful Bible teachers. If you have any kind of aspiration, you've been studying the Word of God and you want to share it with people, that's a good thing.
In fact, that's how I first began to think about being called to ministry. I didn't dream about being a pastor. That was not on my 10-year plan at all.
But when I began to study God's Word, there was something in me that wanted to teach this. I began doing men's ministry. I wanted to teach men how to understand the Bible and how to live the Christian life.
I wanted to grow and I wanted to be sharpened by other guys too. So I began a men's ministry at a previous church and that grew to a second men's ministry. And I wasn't aspiring to ministry at that time.
I didn't want to be a pastor. I just wanted to teach God's Word. So that's not bad.
It's good to want to explain the truths of Scripture. But verse seven, in contrast to that, verse seven presents a situation where a person is desiring to teach the Bible even though they don't know what they're talking about and yet they act like they do. That's very dangerous.
They want to be teachers of the law. When Paul says the law, it's shorthand for the Old Testament Scriptures. They want to teach the Bible.
Okay, they're excited about the Bible but they lack understanding. Now, whether that's through innocent naivete, they just don't really know, they think they do but they don't, or stubborn ignorance, where they don't know what they're talking about and they're just arrogant. Either situation, this person claims to be able to teach others and lacks sufficient understanding of Christian doctrine and the Scriptures.
Furthermore, it's compounded by the fact that despite their lack of understanding, they persist in making confident assertions. They speak like they know. Oh no, that's exactly what that means, even though it's not.
They're insistent that they know what they're talking about. Again, I cannot express to you how incredibly dangerous this is for the church. This is how 1 Timothy 4, 1, deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons are brought into the church.
This is how chapter four, verse three, where we see prohibitions of marriage and ascetic food and body restrictions, legalism, that's how legalism comes into the church. Especially with the Old Testament, when they read the Old Testament and they say, oh, Old Testament law, and they say, well, that's what we have to do. And they try to make a one-to-one correlation, that's how legalistic practices enter in.
You have to understand covenant, you have to understand context, all these different things. That's how prosperity gospel has overtaken so many churches in the world. Chapter six, verse five, when men of depraved mind and depraved of the truth insist that Christianity is a means of financial gain.
They say, oh, this is a great way to make some money. I can just teach this and get paid a salary and I can tell people if they wanna grow their bank account, they need to just give money to the ministry of the Lord, which goes to me. That's what Paul's dealing with in chapter six.
And how many people, I know many of you, how many people have been ruined by prosperity gospel ministries? How many have given money to a faith healer hoping they're gonna be healed and nothing ever happens? And then the faith healer supposedly comes back and says, oh, it's not because it's fake, it's because you don't have enough faith to believe in the miracle. And so enter guilt and shame and all those kinds of things. This is how the faith of believers is turned upside down by false teachers who come in and twist the scriptures to mean that Christ has already returned and they missed it.
That's another one. Chapter 2 Timothy 2.18, talking about the end times. A lot of false teachers dealing with eschatology.
Teachers who have gotten people to cash in their 401k and sit on a building and wait for Jesus. And then when he doesn't come on the date that the person says, they're ruined and their faith is ruined with it. This is the danger of untrained, uninformed and overconfident men who insist that they're qualified to teach God's Word.
Which is why Paul insists, he insists that elders are to be able to teach. Chapter 3 verse 2. Elders have to have qualifications of character, but the main component of eldership is we have to be able to teach God's Word and defend against error. We must have a solid grasp on even just the basics of scripture and sound doctrine.
This is why Paul exhorts Timothy in his second letter, to be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed, handling accurately, cutting it straight, literally. Handling accurately the word of truth, 2 Timothy 2.15. Those who desire to teach God's Word and leads God's people must be devoted to study, trained to competency and examined for proficiency. It's critical.
Otherwise we'll either bring in false doctrine into the church ourselves, or unknowingly allow it to slip by. But this problem is pervasive. And so we must approach spiritual leadership with caution and with care.
Just autobiographically, I tremble every time I get up here. Not because I'm nervous in front of a crowd. I tremble because I understand that I'm dealing with eternal truths.
And I can't afford to get this wrong and neither can you. And as soon as a person, as soon as a man stands up and says, thus says the Lord, you better make sure he's actually saying it. It's a heavy charge.
The issue of caution and care with spiritual leadership. In his exposition of the pastoral epistles in the fourth century, John Chrysostom, he notes this, the devil rages with greater violence against teachers. Because by their destruction, the flock also is scattered.
Make no mistake about it, the enemy does not want teachers in the church. The enemy hates preachers, hates pastors, hates elders, hates Bible teachers, does not want the truth to be taught and will try to destroy teachers any possible way he can. I mean, we're seeing an epidemic of pastoral failure.
It seems to be increasing year by year. I mean, it's scary. Every time I see a pastor publicly fall, I get nervous.
Because I know that I'm no better of a man than the man who just fell. The same sins that ruined him, the same nature exists in me. And so we have to be really careful and be on guard.
But this is why pastors like Paul and Timothy and Titus, they're emphatic that we have to stand against truth and oppose error because that is what creeps in and ruins not only the teachers, but it ruins the churches. Even here in our ministry, we must be vigilant to oppose strange and false doctrines. We must resist doctrinal speculation, fads, theological hobby horses, mythical interpretations.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm good for any question you have. Because sometimes you don't know if you're on the right track or not. So when someone says to me, pastor, I have a question, I'm happy to hear it, I really am.
I wanna help you. Or even when someone will preface and say, this is probably a silly question. I wanna hear it, I really wanna hear it.
Even if it is silly in the end. Because I wanna help you, I wanna help you to learn to discern. Well, that's actually not a silly question, it's actually a big question and let's go here to study it or here is what's in your Bible.
Or maybe I can tell you, hey, actually you're gonna chase your tail on that one. But I wanna know. It's not bad to ask questions and try to learn together, but we're not gonna become devoted to, obsessed with things that are not of eternal importance.
We need to veer away from fruitless discussion and make sure that we have an understanding before we make confident assertions. However, we cannot simply be a church that opposes error all the time. Some churches exist and that's all they ever do.
Pastors get up and all he ever does is just yell at heretics. We can't be that either. I was told early on, don't build the anti-church.
Don't just be about what you're against. That's really important too. Because ministries that only ever call out heresy do not focus on teaching truth.
Again, what is the ultimate goal of ministry? Verse five. The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. And we're gonna talk more about that next week.
But we need to keep these things again in proper perspective. We must be committed to holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching. And in doing so, the shepherd will be able to both exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict.
And so let me offer a charge to all teachers both present but also future. Because I know there are teachers here sitting even in this congregation now, both men and women, we need teachers who can teach the church and teach the men but also women who can teach the other women. And we need teachers.
We need leaders. So to all teachers, present and future, listen to the word of God from 2 Timothy chapter four verses one through five. I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead and by His appearing in His kingdom, preach the word, be ready in season and out of season, reprove, rebuke, exhort with great patience and instruction.
For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. But you, but you be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry." And what a wonderful ministry it is to declare and hold the truth of the word of God. Let's pray.
Heavenly Father, we consider these very sharp warnings. We consider what you have to say, the numerous charges against those who would teach error, who would try to sneak into the church as a savage wolf and not spare the flock. Or even Lord, for those of us who allow ourselves to become entangled with speculation and fruitless discussion.
Lord, if that's something we've been engaged in, I ask that you would convict us and help us to repent. But Lord, more than that, I would ask you that you would ignite a burning passion in the hearts of your people, into my heart, to want to understand your word. Your word is wonderful.
It's beautiful. It's rich. It's sound.
It's pure. It's clean, as Psalm 19 says. There are wonderful truths, not just about the world and what we're doing here, but Lord, it's through your word that we hear from you.
We get to know you. And Lord Jesus, you said that eternal life is knowing God and Jesus Christ whom He has sent. So help us, O Lord, to know you better.
To clear away the distractions. To clear away the fruitless discussion. To stop going down the rabbit hole and focus and become serious and devoted to eternal truth.
Help us to know you better. And not just to know you, but to love you and have a love that is informed with knowledge. Lord, we know that we can only come to know you through salvation.
That you have to turn the lights on in our hearts. You have to give us new hearts. And so Lord, I pray for any of those here listening today who maybe don't know you, who don't know what I'm talking about.
Who have never confessed their sins and never seen a need for salvation. That they would examine their own hearts and see that their heart is sinful and corrupt. That they have sinned against you, a holy God.
And that they would look to Christ who gave His life as a ransom, who died on the cross to pay the penalty for sins. He died in our place, was buried, and rose the third day to bring forgiveness, new life, hope, a future. That Lord, they would see their need for salvation.
They would turn from their sins and confess them and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved. That is the core essential truth. The gospel of salvation.
Lord, glorify yourself. Redeem lost people for yourself. Build us up on our most holy faith.
Mature us. Grow us. Sanctify us.
So that we can open our eyes and see with clarity just how blessed and worthy you are. I pray all these things in Jesus' name.