The Drive to Destroy the Gospel: Watch Out!

We've been dealing with the book of Timothy for the past few weeks and months, and we're starting to wrap up that book. We're coming to the close of it. This morning, we are reminded as we look at Timothy that Timothy, in his context, was staring into an absolute abyss of swirling heresy in his church. There was an emerging Greek Gnosticism, a heresy that was starting to rear its head within the church, whereas Paul references in chapter one verse four, people were devoting themselves, he says, to myths and endless genealogies, mysterious teachings talking about a secret knowledge within the Christian message that went far deeper than the simple message. People weren't willing to believe in a simple message carried along and preached by simple fishermen.

There must be something more to it than this. Timothy also faced the ascetics who were in his church, and what they were teaching, Paul summarised their teaching in chapter four verse three, to abstain from marriage, that's what they taught, particularly the expression of intimacy within marriage, and ordered people not to indulge in certain types of food or drink. These teachers within the church taught that Christianity must be hard on the body in order that we can reach some sort of superior spirituality. Now Paul begins making his closing remarks in his letter. And he comes back to these false preachers that he's addressed firstly in his opening chapter and throughout the letter.

And he begins putting his finger on the essence that is behind much of this false teaching. This teaching that masquerades as a Christian message, and he identifies for us the motives behind this teaching. In other words, this morning as we read this passage, we will find an analysis about how we identify a false gospel. We'll find a teaching on how to identify false gospels, and we will also see the motive that is behind this false gospel. And hopefully, by the end of this morning, we'll also be looking at how we can protect our own hearts from believing that false gospel.

Let's have a look at one Timothy chapter six verses three to verse ten. One Timothy chapter six verse three. If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and he understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth. Imagining that godliness is a means of gain.

But godliness with contentment is great gain. For we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content. Those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.

It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. So far the word of God. We're going to have a look at three points this morning. Firstly, how to identify a false gospel. How to identify a false gospel.

Paul begins explaining how a false teacher can be recognised in his opening statement in verse three. If anyone teaches, he says, a different doctrine, and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the teaching that accords with godliness. He is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. This individual has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth. False teaching, according to scripture here, is anything that does not align with what Jesus taught.

False teaching, according to Scripture, is the teaching that does not align with what Jesus taught, nor what flows out from the godliness that comes from a humble heart, which believes the gospel message that He taught. Those two things is what you need to identify false teaching. On the first part, on aligning what Jesus taught with what someone else is teaching, that's pretty clear for us. We just go to scripture and we can pretty quickly identify, that doesn't compute. The second part, the godliness that flows from that, now that is more difficult.

What does it mean for Paul to say that we are to listen to teaching which accords with godliness? Well, thankfully, Paul has already defined what grounds godliness. And we find that earlier in chapter three verse sixteen. Godliness is defined by Paul in one Timothy three sixteen as, great indeed, he says, we confess, is the mystery of godliness. He was manifested in the flesh.

He was vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. To the question, what is the mystery of godliness? Paul is saying it's not a series of spiritual actions. It's not a series of intellectual controversies to engage in. Godliness is centred on a person.

It begins with He, specifically Jesus Christ. And in that poem that he gives us, more specifically, what Jesus did, His incarnation, His resurrection, the vindication that the Spirit gives Him, and then His glory, His ascension to the right hand of the Father. Those three things amount to godliness. The mystery of godliness. Why does Paul say godliness is not an action, but a person?

And specifically Jesus Christ as that person because godliness has only ever been made possible by the incarnation, by the resurrection, and by Jesus Christ's ascension. The only reason we can ever move towards God honouring lives, godly lives, is because Jesus Christ came to earth in the flesh to wash away our sin, to give us new hearts which are devoted to holy living. The reality is that anyone can therefore be a false teacher. Any one of us. You don't need a pulpit to be a false teacher.

Anyone who claims that the Christian message is anything other than the thing centred on Jesus Christ and His finished work is a false teacher. Over the history of two thousand years, false teaching has sprung up thousands of times, but it is always identified in the same way. It's a rejection of the centrality of the gospel. And today we see it on a number of fronts. Most strikingly perhaps, in the deeply distressing trend of the church to side with the LGBT agenda.

The agenda is winning the battle of rejecting godly sexuality. We're starting to see how much this false teaching is gaining influence in our churches by seeing Christians not daring to say, not daring to even speak the words, homosexuality is a sin. We dare not say that there can only ever be two expressions of genders and those genders are locked in by our biology. We cannot even say that. We cannot be ignorant.

Our churches are wracked by heresy today. So-called Christian teachers advocating that the practice of homosexuality is expressing godly sexuality. We can't be fooled about the perils that our churches are facing today. The ground is slipping from right underneath us. And why is this?

For the same reason Paul identified in one Timothy. We have started believing the deception. We have started getting caught up in the quarrels and the debates over words. Jesus is fine with homosexuality because I never heard Him speak about homosexuality. And we ignore all the other passages in the Bible.

Inch by inch, there are teachers who take scripture, they cut out the clearest words and they make it say whatever their sinful hearts wanted to say, quarrels over controversies and words. I dare say that most of us who are Christians here will be rightly offended by that thought, of those actions. How does this happen though? Well, the church has taken its eye off the rock on which the church was always built. The work of Jesus Christ on the cross, who needed to come to do that work to cleanse us from the undeniably despicable sin of our hearts.

The gospel will not be good news to a gay man. No matter how hard the church tries to bend to his agenda, the gospel will never be good news to him if it does not tell him that his homosexual practices will be condemned by God at judgement day. It won't ever be good news because he has never heard the bad news first. That he will go to hell for eternity for his rejection of God's holy will. The gospel can only be good news when he knows and he hears the truth that Jesus Christ has come to set him free from judgement.

Now, of course, like I said, we say amen and verily to these words. But this is one example of the false teaching that has already so deeply eroded the gospel truth in our churches, that so many people today, people even in this church, have swallowed the teaching without a single thought. Not simply on the sin of homosexuality, but listen closely now. All sorts of other sexual abominations, we rationalise away in our hearts. You cling to a false gospel this morning if you accept or excuse sin, the sin of premarital sex. You excuse and you rationalise away the gospel if you believe that you can engage in marital unfaithfulness against your spouse without repenting, or you will face the judgement of God.

You have believed a false gospel. Perhaps the biggest sexual scourge in the history of the church is the corrupting lust that we enter into through the use of pornography. And it is everywhere. And if we excuse it or rationalise it away, we have believed a false gospel. We have forgotten the teachings of Jesus Christ.

We have forgotten the godliness that accords with that teaching. And we have started believing a false gospel. So Paul begins by saying that a false teacher can therefore be any Christian who proclaims with some level of authority that the church is about anything other than the very thing here in our passage, the teaching of Jesus Christ, and what He had to do to deal with our undeniable sin. The church's main purpose, therefore, is not to make this world a better place, to make people feel comfortable and good about themselves and hold their hands all the way to hell. As opposed to false teachers, the true teachers of the church are not called to enter into political debates about what the church should do for unbelievers.

In many ways, the true church will must stay foreign. It must stay weird. It must stay deeply offensive in every generation rather than being regarded as polite, as convenient, as only mildly eccentric. So firstly, we identify false teaching in that it misconstrues the plain teaching of Christ and tries to replace it with another agenda. Secondly, what is the motive behind false gospels?

Well, the Bible identifies two reasons behind why people will develop, or commit themselves to spreading false teaching. Firstly, pride, and secondly, greed. Pride and greed are identified as the motives in our passage for preaching a false gospel. Paul says in verse four, these teachers are puffed up by conceit. Self important pride is what drives them to their theological positions.

Verse five says that they imagine godliness as a means to gain, as a means to financial improvement. The sin of pride, to take one of the two, according to the Bible, the sin of pride is an obsession with the self. It's an absorption in the self. Pride makes you concentrate everything on you, so that you don't get into a relationship, you don't get into a job, you don't get into anything unless it makes you satisfied about yourself. Therefore, nothing is about doing your thing.

Everything is about you doing those things. C.S. Lewis, in his book Mere Christianity, wrote a chapter on the topic of pride. And in it, he writes, pride gets no pleasure out of having something.

It only gains pleasure out of having more than the next person. In other words, you may think that you're proud of being successful, proud of being intelligent or good looking, but you're not really. Because when you're surrounded by other people just as successful or more, more intelligent, better good looking, better looking, you lose all the pleasure you had in those things. The sin of lust may drive you to sleep with a woman because you want her. Pride, however, drives you to sleep with a woman just to prove that you can do it.

Pride turns everything into a means to an end. And the end is always about getting respect and approval. So these teachers puffed up by conceit distort the gospel to get some sort of self promotion out of it. Whether it be respect in their society, to get a particular professorship at a notable university, to be able to go on TV to speak about how the church can be more accommodating to the current trends, or simply to be regarded as the cool Christian in your circle of friends. All of us can be tempted to distort the gospel by trying to soften the truth of it or to try and rejig the emphasis of it in order to fulfil some personal desire for approval or respect.

Paul says the other motivating sin for false teaching is greed. And greed is a fascinating sin, different to almost any other disobedience, and here's why. Tim Keller in his book Counterfeit Gods identifies it particularly well. It's fascinating and is deeply dangerous, he says, because you don't know when you're being greedy. In contrast, every man who is committing adultery knows exactly what they're doing.

Greed is different. And he explains the phenomenon in this way. He says, some years ago, I was doing a seven part series on the seven deadly sins. You know, the traditional seven deadly sins. And he says, my wife Kathy told me, I bet you the week that you deal with greed, you'll have your lowest attendance.

She was right. People packed it out for lust or the sin of wrath and even for pride, but nobody thought that they are greedy. As a pastor, he says, I've had people come to me to confess that they struggle with almost every kind of sin, almost. But I cannot recall anyone ever coming to me and saying, I spent too much money on myself. I think my greedy lust for money is harming my family or my soul or the people around me.

Greed is so harmful because it hides itself from the victim. The money god's modus operandi includes blindness to your own heart. So Keller explains at least one aspect of this problem, and that is that most of us will sit willingly settle into a particular economic class, and when we look around at our little town or our little situation in life, there are almost always people who are richer than us, who live more lavishly than us. And when we compare ourselves to them, then we don't seem to be doing too bad in the greed department. After all, we don't have as much as the Joneses do.

But the more hidden truth, the more subtle sin is that you're also desperately trying to stay ahead of the other Joneses who live on the other side of the railway track, who live in the other suburb that you don't want to be living in. So we may not drive the BMWs, but we're certainly not going to settle for the Hyundais. Don't be fooled. Greed is as self centred as pride. And that's why it grips the false teachers, because it is all about fulfilling selfish goals.

And it's therefore no surprise that Paul lists those two together. They often go hand in hand. You get money, then you get power. You get power, then you get status. Or it can happen the other way around.

You get status, you get power, and then you get money. Every time you identify some person proclaiming a Christianity that isn't the Christianity of the Bible, it's a pretty safe bet it's being driven by either pride or greed or both. And so if we love and we care for those people in that cycle, we won't win them back by the truth unless you can deal with the sin of their pride or their greed or both. Let's move on to the third and the final point.

How to protect our hearts from believing a false gospel? Notice how Paul moves from speaking specifically in our Bibles about false teachers in verses three through to verse five, and then he starts moving onwards to making general statements about greed and contentment in verses six through to ten. He's not giving specific instructions for false teachers anymore, he's giving Timothy and the whole church instructions on how to view their lives. Why? Because these truths will protect them from falling into believing and proclaiming a false gospel personally.

Whereas false teachers have thought that preaching a false gospel will give them gain, as Paul calls it, will give them some sort of status by producing a fake godliness. Now Paul says in verse six, but godliness with contentment is great gain. Now of course, if we understand scripture, we know that this gain is always spiritual and never physical. The pursuit of material wealth is repeatedly shown in the Bible as empty and futile. The pursuit, the hungry running after it is empty and futile.

The author of Ecclesiastes writes, whoever loves money never has enough money. Whoever loves wealth, he says, is never satisfied with his income. Contentment is inseparably linked with true godliness, however. Contentment is linked with true godliness. Famously, Paul writes in Philippians, for I have learned to be content in whatever circumstance I find myself in.

I know, he says, what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in every and any situation, whether well fed or hungry, living in plenty or in want. I can do everything, he says, through Him who gives me strength. Real contentment has nothing to do with material things. If you understand that statement from Paul, Paul is saying, whether he was rich and had plenty or was poor and had nothing, in neither of those situations was his contentment impacted.

When we are prone to get lost in the shiny things around us, Paul pushes our minds just that little bit further to see life in the perspective of eternity. Or at least here, he says, the bookends of birth and death. He says in verse seven, for we brought nothing into this world and we cannot take anything out of it. Or as Job famously said, naked I came into the world and naked I shall depart. So for us Christians who have tasted eternity, it makes no sense for us to cling to shiny things.

For those who think that greed is gain, Paul proves that greed is actually loss by saying in verse nine, but those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. This apparently seems to have happened to one time spiritual leaders as well, as Paul writes in verse ten. Some have wandered away from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains, with many griefs, another translation says. So to the question, why does this greed lead to pangs of pain and to ruin and destruction? Well, verse nine, verse the second half says, the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.

We know that famous statement. What it means is that the obsession for money can cause someone to murder another person. Imagine that. Taking the life of someone to have a few pieces of paper to buy a composite of carbon in the shape of a car, and people are willing to kill for that. The love of money gambles away houses and families.

The love of money has bent and broken ethics in business and has cost careers. It has driven irreconcilable rifts between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the love of money. And when they think they have gained something, many come to realise with dawning horror the true cost of greed. Greed is loss. It is never gain.

So this morning, as we started talking about false teachers, and perhaps some of us were tempted to punch out mentally or emotionally thinking, well, that's at least not me, think again. These words are risen for us. Why? So that we won't become false teachers. And the solution to prevent us from ever going down that track is to find true contentment in the gospel.

Preacher and author Paul Tripp writes, I am deeply persuaded that materialism is not first a thing problem, it is a God problem. We, as humans, cannot control our lust for things because our capacity for awe has been kidnapped. We find it nearly impossible to be content because the vertical aspect of all that produces contentment is not functioning in our hearts the way God has intended it to. Only when all of God is in its rightful place in our hearts will the physical things around us be in their appropriate places in our lives. How do we solve the problem of pride and greed, which can tempt any one of us to distort the gospel and to become false teachers?

Well, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, by believing in the gospel firstly. That's how we can prevent going down that path. To believe that Jesus gave up all His treasure in heaven. Philippians two verse six. In order to make you His treasure.

One Peter two verse nine. When you truly know that He has died to make you His beloved, then only then will you make Him yours. And when He has become our treasure, by believing the true gospel, which tells us how much we needed Him and how much He loved us, only then will money, earthly approval cease to be the currency of your significance, of your security. To the degree that you grasp the gospel, money and respect will have less and less dominion over you. I want to put up just a few helpful things that this week I've been thinking on, especially regarding the more subtle sin of greed that I know that I can be tempted to fall into, and then I want to give some final thoughts.

Key to your attempted to greediness, buy things for their usefulness rather than their status. Reject anything that is producing in you an addictive reaction. Develop a habit of giving things away. Refuse to be stirred up by the propaganda of modern gadgetry, and learn to enjoy things without owning them. Enjoy the places and the things that can be shared, public parks, libraries.

If you love dogs, play with your neighbour's dog or play with Jackie's dog. This morning, if you find yourself convicted and challenged by the truth of the gospel, repent and believe in the Lord Jesus Christ's work. The work He had to do on the cross because of our undeniable and despicable sin, which we cannot, which we will never be able to rationalise away. If you have realised this morning that there is pride and greed in your heart, work hard to focus your thoughts and your affections on what Christ has done for you and see how those sins will lose their power over you. For those of us who are particularly challenged by the sneaky and hidden sin of greed, let's be mindful of some of these practical things.

Our hope is in Jesus Christ, first and always. Let's pray. Father, we pray for the protection of Your church against all false teaching. And Lord, we see it so much now. We have friends and family who don't know You, who profess to hating You, but then will tell us what the church must be and must do and should teach.

And Lord, terrifying thing is we've started believing them. Help us, Lord, to resist. Help us, Lord, to understand also the wickedness of our own hearts. Where there is an allure to be cool, be accepted by just changing something, just softening something. Or even more scary, to gain some sort of reward, a book sell, a speaking gig where money can be the motivator.

Oh God, we repent of these things. We ask that You will forgive us and that You will lead us into the way everlasting. Protect Your church, Lord. We thank You that You have promised Your will, but do so with a strong arm, with a raised arm as our mighty warrior. Cast out every false teaching, every false preacher.

Refine Your church, Lord. Make it glorious to reflect Your glory and what You have done for us in Jesus Christ. We lay our lives again at Your feet. Do with it what You will. Amen.