How to Survive the Onslaught of False Teaching

Alright. This morning, we will have a look at reading the Bible. A few weeks ago, we did a series on prayer, and we looked at the reasons for our praying. And one of the other, what's called the means of grace in the life of a Christian, is the way in which God extends in an effective way His grace towards us through things like prayer, through the sacraments, baptism and the Lord's Supper, and also, and importantly, His word through the Bible, through the reading of it, the hearing it preached and so on. So this morning, we're going to look at that aspect of Bible reading as a discipline in the life of the Christian, and particularly in the life of the family.

Our title for this morning is "How to Survive the Onslaught of False Teaching and the Desire to Return to the Basics". And we get that main idea, that big idea from 1 Timothy 4 this morning, which is going to be our text. 1 Timothy chapter 4 and we're going to read from verse 6 to verse 16. 1 Timothy 4:6, "If you put these things," Paul said to Timothy, "before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths."

"Rather, train yourself for godliness. For while bodily training is of some value, godliness is of value in every way, as it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance. For to this end, we toil and strive because we have our hope set on the living God, who is the Saviour of all people, especially of those who believe. Command and teach these things."

"Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you. Practise these things. Immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress."

"Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing, you will save both yourself and your hearers." This is the Word of the Lord. In a world where we are really starting to experience a greater pressure to conform to standards that are very far from God's own, the Bible says that we are to fight with God's word. In Ephesians 6, when Paul talks about the armour of God, you know, famously that image, the armour which will protect us against the assaults of the devil.

We're told of things like the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the breastplate of righteousness. And we are told that the sword of the spirit is what? The word of God. And think about all of those aspects of the armour, and they're all defensive. They all stop those fiery bolts from penetrating and hitting us.

The one offensive tool in that armour is the sword, which obviously can both defend, but also push back the enemy. I wonder how many of us think about the Bible in this way, and perhaps we think of it this way, but use it in this way. How important is it for us to know our Bibles and to apply the truth in those Bibles to our daily living? In a world that is starting to become increasingly anti-Christian, a Christian who doesn't have the word of God by their side is going to find themselves overwhelmed by the enemy. This morning, we read a passage from the apostle Paul, who writes to a young pastor by the name of Timothy.

And in this letter, Paul reminds his young protégé that the falling away of Christians to things like silly myths, false teachings of Christians who once professed to have understood the gospel, the Christian message, but now had been swept up in all sorts of different false philosophies. Paul reminds Timothy that the falling away is not unexpected. Every generation will experience this sort of thing. This is not something that only happened in Timothy's time. We read these words, and it's as if Paul is writing to us. Paul says that Timothy and the church must stand firm and shore up their defences and the defences of the church against these attacks.

And as we read, take notice of what this shoring up of defence looks like. It is based on the word of God, and we'll see that in our passage. Paul writes in these verses that Timothy must deal with people who have either rejected the faith or are moving towards that end through the use of the Bible. Paul strengthens Timothy to overcome the powers that are threatening his church, fighting against a culture that's trying to destroy the gospel of hope. And like a skilful coach, Paul tells Timothy to return to the basics.

Like a player, a sportsman in a slump, the coach comes and says, "Remember your footing, your footwork. Remember not to arch your back. Remember to hold your arm in this position." Paul says, "Come back to the basics, Timothy." And Paul focuses on three priorities to keep Timothy and, through Timothy, the church safe.

Three things, focused on bringing back to the basics, the things that will cause us to survive the onslaught of attack. Firstly, Timothy is to point out the goodness of God and His gifts. Our passage, verse 6, begins by alluding to something actually mentioned in verses 4 and 5. Paul says, "If you put these things before the brothers," or the NIV translation says, "point these things out." What is Timothy meant to point out?

Well, Paul says earlier in verse 4 that everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving. In the context of 1 Timothy, there had been a heretical movement, a false teaching movement that was starting to say that being a Christian is good, having faith in Jesus is good, but you must also abstain from eating certain foods. You must also live this sort of monkish life where you say no to a whole bunch of everyday physical things and even abstain from getting married because you have to live a holier life as a Christian. So this isn't pagan sort of stuff like worshipping Zeus or, you know, other Roman gods. This is something that sounds Christian, sounds holy, and Paul says it is a silly myth.

It is a false teaching. Point out to the brothers and sisters these things. God has given us good things. He's blessed us with those things, and He wants us to enjoy them. Christianity is actually very liberal about how we live and enjoy life.

There's a thing in Christianity, and it comes up every generation, where there are people trying to make Christianity very hard. They think that the gospel of grace is too easy. There has to be more to it than believing in a Saviour who's died for your sin. It comes up again and again and again in churches. People are told to be better Christians, true Christians, and they need to do things like eat the Daniel diet.

Who's heard of the Daniel diet? Only vegetables and water in order to be a true Christian. You must give this amount of money in order to be blessed and have that money multiplied tenfold into your bank account. You must volunteer certain amounts of hours to the church. Now, as a pastor, I would love people to volunteer in my church, but if that is the cause for you to be a Christian, the cause of your holiness, then I have told you a falsehood.

In Timothy's case, we find people saying that Christians could only eat and enjoy a very narrow set of meals. They had to participate in certain rituals that were tied to the Jewish faith. Paul says to Timothy, "Point out to the Christian brothers and sisters that God is the creator of all good things, that He has given us these good things to enjoy." So this is the first way to fight against this assault, is to point back to what God has done. How do we point back to that?

We point to Scripture, and Timothy is meant to point these things out by doing what? To go back to Genesis 1 and 2, and to show them theologically that God has created creation and He has called it very good. So it's not an empty philosophy that you must now use, Timothy, to combat these things. Point people back to the Bible, what God has shown Himself to have been and done. This is theology 101.

Put these things before the church. The second thing that Timothy has to do to bring people back to the basics of the Christian faith is verse 7: not to become embroiled in arguments about fables and the myths of false teachers. Now, for me, that is surprising. I'm Dutch, and therefore I am argumentative. And I love the idea of taking up a fight and debating with people about what is right and what is wrong, and what the church should be doing and not be doing.

And yet, here Paul is telling Timothy, don't put yourself in the mess of that. Perhaps he's saying, you're probably not going to convince those guys. Spend your energy in the things that are worth investing in. Instead of debating and debunking these silly myths, Paul says, be careful how you live. He directs him back to godliness, to a spirituality that he can control in his own life.

So don't focus on the apologetics, defence of Christianity in light of these heresies and myths about food and drink and godly living. Timothy, you focus on a godly life. That is the advice. Instead of training his body physically, Paul says, by foregoing certain types of these things, Timothy was to focus on the spiritual. Paul says physical self-discipline, physical training has some value compared with a greater value of spiritual self-discipline. The reason for this is that we look forward, Paul says, to a genuine hope beyond this life.

Eternity compared to our eighty years, ninety seven years, is very big. The hope that rests in the living God, as He says in verse 10, is that God is the Saviour of all people. Now, that's a bit of a red herring there. The Saviour of all people. What does that mean?

Does it mean that God is going to save all people regardless of whether they believe in Jesus Christ and His work? Some universalists, another heresy within Christianity, say that Jesus has died for all people and whether they are believers or staunchly against Jesus, they'll just be mistaken and at the end, "Wow, Jesus did it all for us. Great." And they use this passage here to make that point. What does it mean that God is the Saviour of all people?

Well, it's not in the sense that all will be saved from eternal death, but that individuals from all quadrants of humanity have become Christian. So that in Revelation, we hear of people from all tongues, all tribes, all nations bowing before the King Jesus. Secondly, while God's common grace has delayed wrath for a time and therefore has spared us, or saved us for a time, Jesus said that the sun will shine, the rain will fall on the righteous and the unrighteous alike. God has saved those who respond positively to the gospel in faith. And Paul says that it is this hope that produces godliness in us.

If this hope, if you believe in that, that is the thing that you must focus on. And so godliness comes from a right heart, not a right body. That is Paul's point. Godliness comes from a right spirit, not a right physical body. So that's the second thing.

Don't become embroiled in arguments and fables and myths. Live a godly life. And then thirdly, the thing that Timothy has to do to bring people back to the basics of the Christian faith is to bring people back to focus on God's word, and that's what we find in these latter verses. Paul says, in order to combat heresy, you don't fight harder or more cleverly. You just come back to Scripture.

Verse 11: "Command and teach these things." Verse 13: "Until I come to you, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exaltation and to teaching." Now, Timothy is given this command because he's a pastor. He has that responsibility to teach the flock. As Christians, we don't have that specific command.

That's not our imperative. Well, your imperative, it is my imperative. But we see the principle here that we can all adopt, and that is the focus on Scripture. It is the solution to the assault.

It is the defence against the attack. Now, this teaching, this devotion to teaching is probably referring to a systematic instruction on the doctrines of faith. It's not general things. It is specifically what Jesus has done. Our soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, our Christology, the theology of Christ.

There's an intentional framework in view here so that when these false teachers come knocking on the door and they want to convince you of the great new news, "Have you heard? There's a new perspective on Christianity." Paul's encouragement to Timothy is both to know the Bible personally and then to share it with others to encourage them to know it. So be devoted to it. Make time for it. Prioritise it in your life.

Now, I want us to reflect on these things this morning. In a time that is increasing its rejection of the Christian faith, we saw the results of the election in Victoria last week of a premier who is pretty anti-Christian. And it's just becoming, if you look at those results, more and more anti-Christian, where there is more and more overreach from governments into Christian schools, and we are starting to feel those things, where people are actually being fired for holding traditional biblical values, and not necessarily holding those things publicly, but simply being associated with a church that holds those things. People are being fired from high profile positions.

The question you have to answer is: how devoted to the word of God are you? Because that is your defence. That is your only hope. How devoted are we to the Scriptures that will tell us what the truth is? So with that, when the test comes and knocks on your door and you are faced with a challenge to give up the Christian faith or to undermine it to such an extent that you are essentially giving it up, or you may lose your job, lose the institution that you've worked at building your entire life, or lose your status in society, the question is: have you devoted yourself so much to Scripture that you can resist that temptation?

There's a growing urgency for everyday Christians to know God and His ways more and not less, to be able to think biblically and theologically in a world that is increasingly hostile and anti-Christian. And so, like I've been saying the past few months, regular church attendance, Sunday school, catechism, bringing your kids to those things is vitally important. I've been saying these things since we started returning from COVID lockdowns and there's still a lag in taking those things up. But Paul will tell us they're not optional extras for the Christian.

Weekly church attendance is not a 50 per cent strike rate. If you can come, you need to come. This morning, we are especially reminded of the disciplines of Bible reading, Bible knowledge. And I want to say, especially in the family or personal arena. Paul is giving instruction here to Timothy as a pastor in the corporate setting of his teaching ministry to commit himself to the public reading of Scripture and to the teaching of the church.

But there is also in this passage this element of internalising the gospel truths first for Timothy, and that is what applies to us as well. We are called to internalise the word of God so that we may, in turn, be godly and resist the falsehoods of this world. And it's those aspects of the heart that are most often dealt with in the privacy and the everydayness of personal devotions and family devotions. It's a remarkable thing that during the Reformation, the great upheaval in Europe in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century, there was a time where an entire generation needed to be won back to Scripture. It's difficult to overstate.

You know, biblical literacy is a problem in churches today. We don't know our Bibles well enough. But there were entire generations that grew up with only the Latin Bible, corporate worship in pure Latin while they were German speaking, you know, while they were with French. They didn't know these words. They didn't understand the Bible. And the strategy of this great Reformation didn't start in the great cathedrals of those churches.

They started with pastors and elders going from house to house, family to family, and teaching mum and dad how to read their Bibles, understanding the basics of theology, and then entrusting them to teach their kids. That is how the Reformation happened. How do you transform the church today? How do we win back a generation that is being lost to the anti-Christian sentiment felt in our time? It is by simply having families read the Bible again.

How do we ensure that our kids, maybe our grandkids, if we have that sort of leverage, how do we keep them in the faith? It is to devote ourselves and our times to the reading of Scripture, to the exhortation from it, and to teaching now. I know, pastor, this is a "give me" statement. I can say this and everyone immediately feels guilty. We could be doing this better. We could be doing it more.

Desi and I this week have talked about the craziness of a new baby and how that throws your schedule right out the window. Family devotions are a mess. Personal Bible reading is messy. And yet, this morning, I'm being reminded and you are being reminded that this is part of the Christian life. It is a core aspect of our life.

So I want to give us a few practical tips, not just a "give me" statement that will make us feel heavy and leave here feeling burdened. Here are some practical steps on how to do this and hopefully we get through this quickly. How do we begin? Well, we begin by setting aside regular time. We just have to commit.

Can it happen after dinner when everyone, more or less, is sitting together around a table? Does it have to happen in the morning? If everyone, I don't know, amazingly are early birds and have enough time in the morning before school to do this. There are natural times for the family being together. Now, for some families, like I said, it can be around dinner.

It can be bedtime as well. But whatever time you decide to set aside, be sure that the whole family, the whole household can be together on a regular basis because consistency is the key here. It is a part of that training to godliness that Paul is speaking about here. How do you train? You go to the gym regularly.

You do it consistently. That is how you train. And then what do you include? So that is how to begin. You set aside regular time.

And then what do you include in that? Well, three things: reading the Bible, discussing it, and teaching from it, and then prayer. Reading from God's word. Firstly, when we read as a family, we want to read out loud. That's a really good way to do it because everyone hears it.

Everyone is involved. It's also, I think, more important than ever before, really important that everyone has a copy of their own Bible and not to have it on the phone because those push notifications, man, they are distracting. Paper versions of the Bible together. Not one person reading on behalf of everyone to listen. Everyone has their own Bible with them.

If you're using a devotional booklet, don't settle on reading just that key verse, you know, they give you that one verse to read and then they have their devotion from that. You go and read the entire passage that it suggests. Then take turns reading a few verses at a time. Get each one in the family to read. If the passage is big enough, allocate perhaps a paragraph to each person.

Again, there are very different ways to approach those daily readings, but here are some of the best sort of structures or frameworks to do it. You can decide to read a chapter a day as a family. Right? And you just work through Ephesians in a series of six days. Or you can do a Bible reading plan like Robert Murray McChyne, the Bible over the course of a year, you can decide to do as a family and that sort of jumps through the Old and New Testaments and the Psalms and so on.

Or you can decide to do a family Bible study programme. Go to Qurong. You can ask me what are some good family devotions that you can do, and that'll teach you through or, yeah, guide you through a family discussion, a study series together. Then comes the important part, and that is to discuss what you've read. It's very important that the words and the mental images that you've read in the Bible come down from the head and penetrate the heart.

That is where the godliness aspect of the faith lives. We want our knowledge about the Bible to transform us. There's a few important reminders to take heed of here. David Helm, his book "One to One Bible Reading", it's a great little book, he says, nothing kills Bible discussion, that communal Bible reading more than one person dominating, or he says, pontificating about the text. I can tell you, as a pastor and the one that often gets sort of assumed to be the one that has the knowledge about everything, I'm given the permission to pontificate, to teach, and that overwhelms people, and that disengages good creative thinking and critical thinking about Bible passages.

So in leading as particular fathers, in those ways, it is good to be a good listener as well as a good speaker. How can you become a good listener? Well, firstly, you can try and keep the discussion clear and concise. Offer those very good basic type of questions. What has happened here in this passage?

Can you sum up what is being taught? How do you think this applies to your life? I think the most helpful question of all, just to get juices flowing, is "What do you think?" And it can be like, "I have no idea what's going on here. What do you think about this?"

Secondly, it's important to maintain that good balance between participation, listening, and leadership. So on the one hand, the whole family is encouraged to participate actively and naturally, but it's also important that there is that one person, typically dad, who might steer the conversation back to helpful areas. You might also find that there are tricky questions in hard to understand passages that you may not have an answer for. Don't give an answer that's going to be wrong and sort of make as if that's the answer. If you don't know, you say, "I don't know."

Let's go and research this and we'll come back to it. And then come back to it. And then thirdly, and this is also something that I think we don't think about a lot, is those times of being together as a family around and. Couples are family doesn't mean just kids and so on. Being together, it's important to give time to be sensitive to those random issues being read into the text or being triggered from the text so that when you're reading, someone says, "How do I share the gospel with my friend who is saying this to me?" or "Today, I experienced bullying and, you know, this was said to me" or or whatever.

It's something from that text, something through the working of the Holy Spirit has evoked that response and addressed that as much as you can from the Bible, but that is a wonderful opportunity to drive people back to reflection on good and godly principles. And then, finally, and we'll wrap it up here, we finish with prayer. So God speaks to us from His word. We believe that. Right?

But God wants a two-way conversation. That aspect of response happens through prayer. Our loving heavenly Father is concerned about our challenges. He is concerned about the things that we are wrestling with, and He wants to hear from us as much as He wants us to hear from Him. So I encourage families to keep a prayer list or a notebook as a family to write down the things that are being prayed for as a family.

Last week, we talked about thanksgiving, to be reminded of, going back to God for His answered prayers and giving Him the praise that He deserves. And how can you do that? By writing it down, coming back to it a few weeks later. So this morning, if you aren't already, I want to encourage you to take up that good discipline of family devotions. I realise that some of us aren't in context where our entire families are Christian or are interested.

I understand that some of us are single and we share with flatmates. But that communal aspect of Bible reading, for all of us, is a really important and healthy habit. So whether you have a bunch of very fidgety kids around the dinner table, or whether you have a very quiet house or housemate, create that habit of intimacy with God either personally or with your family, so that what the apostle Peter says in 2 Peter 3, "so that we may grow in grace and that we may grow in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus as our Saviour." In a world beginning to actively deconstruct the hope of the gospel, we want to press into Jesus more, not less.

May you and I find lasting hope, invigorating life-changing godliness in every day, real light realigning our hearts and our minds back to Him. Let's pray. Father, we thank you that there are good and practical things in our life that we can employ and engage to create in us routines and habits and ways of approaching life that will be for our good, both in this life and in the next. Lord, forgive us when we may tend to intellectualise the Christian faith and think in our tradition that can often happen where we think of rich and noble thoughts and where we fail to live the implications out of those incredible truths. Help us, Lord, to reprioritise our lives as we head towards the end of this year and things are busy.

Help us to grab a hold of changes that can happen now, should happen now, but Lord, especially as we start making New Year's resolutions, as we start thinking about practising good health things, exercising more and eating better and all of those things, Lord, help us to prioritise these things as well for our new year too. We thank you for the incredible health and godliness that you desire for us, that these are qualities that can be ours in Christ Jesus and help us, Holy Spirit, to be guided by you to do those things. In Jesus' name, we pray. Amen.