It's customary when you're the guest preacher to thank people for letting you preach and thank you for the privilege of preaching. But also thank you for all of you who brought us meals during the time of Catherine Sickness and cared and watched over my children because if you didn't do that, then the sermon tonight would be closer to the Babel that Paul deplores rather than the sound doctrine that he exhorts the church to have. So let's look together at 1 Timothy 6. I think it's on page 993 in the Black Queue Bible in front of you.
It's 1 Timothy 6. All of you doing something I don't think I've ever done before. I'll start with the second half of verse 2 because if you look in the pew Bible, they group the second half of verse 2, teach and urge these things with the rest of the passage. I'll be reading 1 Timothy 6, the end of verse 2, that last sentence of verse 2, all the way to verse 10.
1 Timothy 6. Teach and urge these things 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's popped up with conceit and 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. Now there is great gain in godliness with contentment 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. 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. 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 pangs. Well let's ask the Lord to help us as we examine this passage together.
Let's pray. High King of heaven we long to know the sound words to agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness. We do not want to see anyone wander away from the faith and pierce him or herself with many pangs on the contrary. We want to taste and see the Lord is good, to know that there is great gain in godliness with contentment.
And so Lord Jesus, by your Holy Spirit, work in our hearts, transform our thinking and our wicked thoughts and desires to the praise of your glorious grace. Amen. Amen. Well Marcus Lekinius Krasas who died in 53 BC was considered rich in the Apostle Paul's day, so about a century later.
Some Romans, some contemporary Romans placed his net worth as equivalent to the annual budget of the entire Roman Empire. To put things in perspective, the United States government apparently spent almost $4 trillion last year. You have a lot of money if you had $4 trillion, I mean I'm not an economist but I'm just thinking that's the case. Now more modern estimates think that in contrast to $4 trillion, Krasas was a mere copper with perhaps $200 million to $20 billion.
Either way, that's quite a fortune. When Paul talks about money or later in this chapter, when he addresses rich people specifically, we should know that the ancient world knew what real tremendous wealth was like. Very very few people had of course and I'm pleased to note that even Krasas himself didn't have a dishwasher or air conditioning. But these people knew what real wealth was, what astonishing wealth was.
But let's be clear, the focus of this passage is not money. Instead, Paul expresses his concern right at the start, right there at verse 3, it's false teaching. Those who teach a different doctrine and don't agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus. Paul actually uses the words there, the use of the word there in verse 3 teaches a different doctrine, that he uses right at the very start of the letter in chapter 1 verse 3.
And we've seen how that we, Paul again and again, express his concern over false teachers. In chapter 1, they're the ones who promote speculations about myths and genealogy and talk about the law without understanding. In chapter 4, Paul warns Timothy about false teachers who will encourage people to abstain from certain foods and forbid marriage. And now in chapter 6, Paul is again telling Timothy to be aware of false teachers.
He's telling Timothy what they teach, what they do and who they are. And in a nutshell, these false teachers are swerving from the faith in their destroying the church. Now why does Paul take time to talk about the teachers themselves? I found one commentator, I found very helpful.
He said, behind the opponents decide their supposed intellectualism and false piety is their real motivation for their ministry. They want to make money. They think that ministry pays and it pays very well. And let's be honest, ministry does pay, or at least it should.
Paul says so in this letter, right? In the last chapter, in 1 Timothy chapter 5 verses 17 and 18, Paul says that good, faithful, gospel preachers deserve both honor and pay. Nevertheless, good ministers don't preach for honor. They don't preach for pay.
Instead, they preach Christ and their focus is his glory. The apostle Paul is defending his own ministry in 2 Corinthians chapter 4. He says for what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord, with ourselves as your servants for Jesus sake. Paul's point, it's not about Paul, it's about Christ.
So this passage, though it ends with an extended meditation on the perils of money, begins with and I think is consumed by an exhortation to Timothy to be a faithful gospel teacher in the face of false teachers who are in it for a buck. Now, we can say this passage from the second half of verse 2 all the way to verse 10, under four headings, they're four headings. We'll look at the contents of preaching, its impact on the community, what kind of character is promoted by the ministry and finally the consequences. And I want us to balance our assessment.
We're not just going to think about false teachers, we're going to also think about good teachers. We're going to do that because that's what Paul does and so we'll follow his lead. So our four headings again are content, community, character and consequences. First content, content, good teachers teach the Bible.
But bad teachers offer their people a different doctrine, verse 3. One does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching, the chords of Godliness. Now Paul's expression in chapter 6, the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ, could mean any number of different things. I think most likely it either means Paul's words about the Lord Jesus or it could be an indication that they already have a written gospel, perhaps the gospel of Mark in their hands.
But either way, notice what the false teachers are rejecting. They're rejecting some part of what is now in our New Testament. Now they're not trusting the Bible. Where are they getting their ideas?
Well Paul is clear. False teachers spew forth whatever gibberish happens to come into their depraved minds. We see this in verse 5. They have depraved minds in the deprived of the truth and yet they keep on talking.
And earlier in chapter 2, earlier in 1st Timothy, when Paul was talking about the truth, he identifies the truth with saving faith and knowledge of the Lord Jesus, the one mediator between God and man. And so that's a big truth to set aside. Now we live in an easygoing age theologically. We're pretty easygoing about what people believe, not just about Bible, but about everything.
But Paul wasn't so careless as we are about his defense of Christian teaching. One commentator notes that different doctrine for Paul is deviant doctrine. Different doctrine is deviant doctrine. It's not someone's privately held opinion.
It's a departure from the faith. Now this August marks the 10th anniversary, it's amazing for me for years. It marks the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, a devastating storm that changed forever the lives of many along the Gulf Coast, especially southern Mississippi and most notably of course New Orleans. We'll imagine that there you are in New Orleans and your home was devastated by Katrina.
You lost everything except a copy of your home insurance contract. You file a claim and through your tears you begin to think about rebuilding your home. But then you receive word from the insurance agent that your insurance company is upholding a different doctrine, one that does not agree with the sound words of your home insurance contract or the teaching that accords with your homeowners policy. How would you respond?
You wouldn't. Trug your shoulders. You wouldn't be indifferent. You'd say that the insurance agent was puffed up with conceit and understood nothing.
You marvel at the insurance company's unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words. Well, similarly we may think that somebody's theological musings, apart from the Bible, are a novel curiosity. So what we call an interesting idea, Paul calls heresy. Just as a aside, I find this deeply convicting as I'm a philosopher.
And so most of what people talk about at conferences is stuff from their heads and it's deeply convicting for me personally to think that I need to be more zealous for the gospel. These are not idle speculations. People are puffed up with conceit, verse four. They understand nothing.
These are harsh words, but they are harsh words only if the gospel is unimportant. If the gospel isn't important, then such frenzied zeal is misplaced. It's like getting really angry about the color of somebody else's car. Who cares?
Why make a fuss? But if you think the gospel is your life and friends, the gospel is your life. Then teaching something different isn't a teacher's prerogative. Instead it's a dandable, curse-worthy offense.
Now by contrast to Paul's teachers, good teachers are faithful to the sound words of Jesus and the teaching that accords with Godliness. Good teachers, verse two, be. Teach and urge these things. That's what Paul tells Timothy to do, teach and urge these things.
What in the world is he talking about? Personally, I think he's referring back to what we just heard last week and in preceding weeks. To honor people. Chapter five and the opening verses of chapter six.
Honor widows, chapter five verse three. Elders, chapter five verse seventeen. And slave masters, chapter six verse one. Now second though, it's interesting because this expression occurs previously in first Timothy, first Timothy chapter four verse eleven.
It should be on the other side of the page. Command, and teach these things. And I think I want to read too much into it, but I think it's significant. I think Paul's offering a more general approach to disagreement.
In the face of the pompous ignoramus for sport of chapter six, who has an unhealthy craving for controversy and quarrels about words, Timothy should stick to the truth. He should preach the gospel. Later in chapter six and verse twenty, Paul will say, oh, Timothy, guard the deposit entrusted to you. Avoid the irreverent battle and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.
Avoid the battle. Stick to the Bible. So redeem a Presbyterian church. In the face of someone who wants to joust verbally with you about obscure philosophical musings.
Sometimes the biggest disservice that you can do to yourself and to that person is to neglect the teaching of the gospel and focus on whatever foolish topic of conversation is proposed. Let's be a church that says, well, may I tell you what I believe about more generally before we consider this specific topic? But in other way, may I teach you the gospel first before we talk about this one issue. Let's get the content right.
Let's stick to the Bible and not to battle. That's our first point. Second, community. One obvious task for false teachers, the content of this message.
Another task is what it does to the community. False teaching reads strife and disunity in the church, not love and unity. One commentator knows that Paul may have criticized their lifestyles and what they're doing in part because their teaching is so incoherent. And when your opponents are incoherent, when they just battle on, it's good to have other things to look for apart from what they're just saying.
In the Haddock, these people bring to a Christian community is a mark of them being a false teacher. So look down at verse four. These false teachers produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicion, first part and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth. Notice that there's a progression here.
You envy someone. You're jealous. That promotes dissension, which is a minor conflict, but it erupts into slander because you're talking about the person that you envy, right? This is on evil suspicions because you think the people that you're talking to should side with you rather than the person who's your opponent with the result, what?
The church, which should be, in some sense, a harbor, a refuge from the world is just as bad or perhaps even worse. Now, Timothy may be a timid man. It depends on how you read 2 Timothy 1, 7. If Paul is writing in 2 Timothy 7 2 Timothy directly, then Timothy may be timid because their Paul says, for God gave us a spirit, not a fear, put it power and love and self-control.
And if Timothy is a timid man, then he may just hope that a false teacher will go away or have only a marginal influence. But Paul implicitly instructs Timothy here that the false teacher, that the problem isn't just going to go away if you ignore it. It'll destroy the church. Now, it'll be worse than that as we'll see in a moment, but false teaching at least destroys a community.
So content, it's Bible versus battle and community. It's unity or division. Third, there's character. What kind of character does false teaching promote?
Well, there's a clear distinction between contentment on the one hand and covetousness on the other. We see contentment in verses 6 and 8 and covetousness in verses 9 and 10. False teachers imagine verse 5 that godliness is a means of gain. In Paul's morning Timothy, Timothy, don't be mistaken.
False teachers don't have good motives. How could they? They're not teaching the gospel for the gospel because they don't teach the gospel. Verse 3, they teach a different doctrine and they are deprived of the truth for a five.
Instead, they're in it for a buck. Now, I'm not going to scandalize you by telling you that there are people like this today who teach some kind of message that sounds marginally Christian and they do it for the money. But it's important for us to remember that this phenomenon is not new. It's not a peculiarly American phenomenon.
Though we may be good at reading this kind of false teacher in America, it was an issue in Paul's own day. As one commentator notes, Paul found himself. The Paul himself found it necessary to declare that, unlike many, he didn't peddle the word of god for profit, second Corinthians chapter 2, that he never coveted anybody's silver gold or clothing, chapter 20, and that he never used religion as a cloak for greed, verse thessalonians chapter 2. And here, Paul was saying, watch out for the covets.
And he contrasts the covetousness with godliness with contentment, verse 6. It is great gain. The gospel does in fact pay. It pays well.
It's not in the way the false teachers think. They promote a character of covetousness, but good teachers by preaching the Bible promote contentment. Verse 6, godliness with contentment is great gain. Verse 8, but if we have food and clothing, we will be content.
Now, the word here for clothing just means covering. So it could actually extend to anything that covers you from clothing to your house or some kind of shelter. But notice that Paul here is not saying that we should live some kind of ultra minimalist lifestyle. We misunderstand Paul if we thought that we couldn't own automobiles or even pencils because they're not included in the rubric of food and clothing.
Instead, we know that God wants us richly to enjoy the many blessings of the slide. In fact, Paul uses that very language later in chapter 6 and verse 17. God who richly provides us with everything to enjoy. But we must be careful as we enjoy the blessings of God and as we labor, as we work to provide for ourselves or if we have a family or families, that we don't become consumed with getting just a little more.
Arthur Schopenhauer remarked that riches are like seawater. The more you drink, the thirstier you become. And Paul tells Timothy don't drink seawater. He reminds him of what his Savior and ours taught, namely that a man's life does not consist in the abutance of his possessions.
That's why verse 10, Paul says, for the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Now let me offer some quick points here on this one verse. Notice that it's the love of money, not money itself. It's a root of evil, not just the only one.
And it's not a root of all evil, but of many various kinds of evil. And Paul focuses on two in verse 10, wandering away from the faith and piercing themselves with many things. Now I think it's fair to say that no one in this building is immune from the struggle. A report several years ago, study several years ago, reported that 85% of Americans, 85% of Americans, wants to be in the top 18% of American households.
And only 15% of us want to end up in the middle class. Think about that for a moment. The vast majority of us don't want to end up where we are, where we will be, or in fact I never be, because we'll earn less than a middle class income. And Godly preaching, teaching the chords with the sound words of our Lord Jesus, encourages contentment with where God and his goodness has placed us.
And it doesn't encourage covetousness, which is already in the heart, wanting a little bit more. Contentment and not covetousness. That's the character Godly preaching promotes. And finally, we need to think about the consequences of true and false teaching, the consequences of the instruction.
Does a teacher preach deliverance in Christ Jesus or does he lead a congregation on the primrose path, the destruction? So what are the consequences of teaching, deliverance or destruction? Godlyness with contentment is great pain, verse 6. Because verse 7, we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world.
And Job said, naked I came from my mother's womb and naked shall I return. This is true, isn't it? John Todd tells the story of a minister who has asked how much a wealthy woman had left at her death. His response was straight forward simple and sobering.
She left everything. She left everything. There are no pockets in a shroud. Yet from this reflection on death and nothingness, Paul can somehow say in verse 8, if we have food and clothing, we will be content.
How? How? If I'm going to leave this world with nothing, how can I rest content now? And to answer this question, we need to remind ourselves of Paul's own confession to Timothy in the first part of this work.
And if you look back to 1 Timothy 1, it's on 991 in the pew Bible, 1 Timothy 1, verse 15. Paul says, the saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into the world of safe sinners, of whom I am the foremost. And I receive mercy for this reason that in me as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display His perfect patience as the example to those who were to believe in Him for eternal life. Paul himself has been delivered.
And a faithful Bible teacher teaches this deliverance. You have been set free. But to teach a message of deliverance, you also have to preach a message of bondage because you have to be rescued, if you're going to be delivered, you have to be delivered from something. So, notice that in 1 Timothy 1, Paul doesn't say, well, I was fairly reflective, I was religiously minded, and I thought carefully about the claims of Jesus, and I decided I'd give it a go.
On the contrary, Paul says I'm the chief of sinners. Jesus saved me because he wanted to show the world that he can rescue lawbreakers. And instead of sin and hell, Paul's life has mercy and eternal life written on it all because of Jesus. The true gospel preachers then preach deliverance, but false teachers ferry people farther along the road to hell.
So, look back at 1 Timothy 6, in verse 9 we see a terrible progression, or we could actually say a descent from desire to temptation to a snare that is a trap, and finally to ruin a destruction. Now, the snare of 1 Timothy, previously in chapter 3, verse 7, belongs to the devil himself, and I think the same is true here in chapter 6. Not from promised gain, which is what the false teachers hope for in verse 5. Those that make money and idle find themselves plunged into Satan's trap and plunged into ruin and destruction.
Now, this expression, ruin and destruction, can be taken together or it can be taken separately. If you take the phrases 1, ruin and destruction, then it evokes the imagery of shipwreck and drowning. If however, it's ruin and destruction, then the phrase suggests ruin in this life and hell in the next. Now, there's reason to favor either 1.
Even in destruction by the sea would have been a familiar worry to anyone in the Mediterranean world. Ray Lawrence in his book, Ronan Passions, remarks in the 1st century, there was this explosion and economic boom in metalworking. People got into drinking cups and dinner plates, they even got water pipes. And what evidence do we have of this vast trade in metal in the 1st century?
What evidence do we have? Shipwrecks, shipwrecks. We know that there was an explosion of metalworking in the 1st century because it ended up at the bottom of the sea. Ruin and destruction.
Now, I actually think that I prefer the ruin in this life and hell in the next, though. I think they're both possible but I lean towards ruin in this life and hell in the next. Here's why. When Jesus is talking in Matthew 7 about entering through a narrow gate because the gate is wide and easy that leads to destruction, he's using the same word.
And he's not saying that fraud is the road to financial ruin. He's not some kind of life coach. He's saying it's easy to go to hell. Just keep on doing what you're doing.
Paul uses the same word himself in Romans 9 when he talks about vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. Again, Paul has hell in mind here. Finally in Philippians 1, Paul contrasts the Philippian salvation with their opponents' destruction. Again, the same word.
He's not saying the Philippians will be rich and their opponents will be poor. On the contrary, the next verse actually he says to them, for it has been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you should not only believe in him but also suffer for his sake. Paul is saying, look, you may be poor in this life and you may be persecuted but you will go to heaven. Your opponents will go to hell.
Now there is a serious problem with false teachers. There's a serious problem and we need to be aware of this as a church and our interaction with people. False teachers offer to unconverted people a message that appeals to what they already desire and affirms what they already believe. So people aren't ever struck with the need to repent.
They're never hit with their reckless pursuit of riches and how it's leading them to hell to play off the titles of a popular preacher. Let me tell you, it's not your best life now because your citizenship is in heaven. Every day is in Friday because we live in a fallen creation with this old's and thorns. It's not your time because your time belongs to Jesus.
The prosperity gospel says God wants you to be rich in this life. That's what the prosperity gospel says. God wants you to be rich in this life. But look to the Lord Jesus, the Son of God himself was born in a manger and most pressingly the cross of Christ says suffering now, glory later, suffering now, glory later.
As we close, I'll just remind you that we just sang together beat out my vision. It's an ancient Irish poem that was translated into English by Mary Byrne and then versified by Eleanor Holt. And we sang, I'll just reread a little portion of that, him to you. Ritches, I heed not, nor man's empty praise, thou mine in heresens now and always, thou and thou only, first in my heart, high king of heaven, my treasure thou art.
This hymn easily written over a thousand years ago, captures poetically Paul's point. Do I need riches or honor? No. What why?
Because such things are not important. No, no, of course not. They are important. But where are my riches?
With you, my God, you are my heresens now and always. Where's my treasure? You, God, you are my treasure. The high king of heaven is first in my heart, him and him alone.
And may God make this true for me and for you, always and forever. Amen.