WWUTT 691 Lovers of Self Rather Than Lovers of God?

When Jesus said, love your neighbor as yourself, what he was saying was, as you are so inclined to love yourself, direct that love to your neighbor.

The world will tell you, you need to love yourself. That's exactly your problem when we understand the text.

Many of the Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is an online ministry dedicated to teaching the

Word of God in context, promoting sound doctrine while exposing the faulty. Here's your teacher,

Pastor Gabe. Thank you, Becky. Still in 2nd Timothy, we're jumping into chapter 3 today.

And I'll be reading the first nine verses. The Apostle Paul writes, But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.

For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self -control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power.

Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.

Just as Janus and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also opposed the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith.

But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of those two men.

So, once again, Paul presenting to Timothy to beware of false teaching.

This was throughout his instructions that he gave in the first letter in 1 Timothy, all six chapters.

In fact, we had a point at the start of the letter, right at the middle, and right at the end where Paul made a great emphasis against those who teach wrongly.

And here even in 2 Timothy, Paul's last address to Timothy, he is sure to remind him once again that one of his responsibilities as a pastor is to preach the sound word of God and oppose those who contradict it.

We have that stated more plainly in Titus 1 9. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also rebuke those who contradict it.

But, as we just read at the end of chapter 2 last week, that in so doing, in correcting those who teach wrongly, we must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting opponents with gentleness.

Our ability to shout louder than somebody else or come up with the most convincing arguments is not going to be the thing that wins them from their false teaching into the truth.

It is speaking the truth with kindness and with gentleness, for God may perhaps grant them repentance, verse 25, leading to a knowledge of the truth.

And they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.

So now as we get into chapter 3 here, Paul is basically presenting, here are those who have been ensnared by the devil, captured by him to do his will, and these are the people that we will encounter in the last days.

By the way, when Paul was writing to Timothy, that was the last days. When we're reading this letter 2 ,000 years later, we're still in the last days.

The last days are that period of time between Christ's resurrection and his eventual return.

We are in the last days now. This has been what is referred to as the final age, or as John refers to it in his letter in 1

John, the last hour. You know that this is the last hour. So this is it.

The next event that we are looking forward to is the return of Christ. Praise God, glory hallelujah.

And then at that point, he brings in his peaceful kingdom. He removes all those who are evil and we dwell forever with the

Lord Christ in the new heavens and the new earth. But in the meantime, while we continue to inhabit these fleshly bodies in this fallen, depraved world that has been subjected to futility, here's what we experience.

Times of difficulty for people are going to be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient, and on and on it goes.

Now that certainly applies to absolutely everybody. Paul says in verse two, for people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive.

So we're not just talking about in the context of the church, you know, those false converts that might turn out to be this way.

But but that's everybody inside the church, outside the church. We will encounter those who are lovers of themselves.

And then all the rest of of this list of depravities that Paul lists flows from that.

They don't love God. They love themselves. And so that's why they are heartless and unappeasable, why they are slanderous and without self -control, why they don't love good, why they're swollen with conceit, while they're why they're lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

And they will even have the appearance of godliness, but they will deny its power.

Actually a pretty good example of that. We witnessed just this weekend a royal wedding that took place at Windsor Castle in England with Prince Harry and his new bride,

Meghan. It was as fairy tale as you would expect any kind of wedding to be at Windsor Castle.

Preaching the sermon during the wedding was an Episcopal bishop that might tell you something right there.

But the Bishop Michael Curry and his sermon was about love. He talked a lot about love.

He mentioned God. He talked about Jesus Christ. He quoted some scriptures. He even mentioned the first and second greatest commandment.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength and love your neighbor as yourself.

But while Bishop Curry presented an appearance of godliness, something was still a little bit off, even about the way that he explained the first and second greatest commandment.

Here's the clip. Jesus of Nazareth on one occasion was asked by a lawyer to sum up the essence of the teachings of Moses and he went back and reached back into the

Hebrew scriptures to Deuteronomy and Leviticus and Jesus said you shall love the Lord your

God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength. This is the first and great commandment and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.

And then in Matthew's version he added, he said on these two, love of God and love of neighbor hang all the law, all the prophets, everything that Moses wrote, everything in the holy prophets, everything in the scriptures, everything that God has been trying to tell the world, love

God, love your neighbors and while you're at it, love yourself.

You know, he was on a pretty good roll there for a little bit until he got to the very end and, and he added, he added to the first and second greatest commandment.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Oh, and while you're at it, love yourself.

It's like he had to throw in a little Joel Osteen addendum at the end of the first and second greatest commandment.

That's not what the commandment means when it says, when it says love your neighbor as yourself, it does not mean love yourself.

You have no problem loving yourself. That is, that is actually, that actually is your problem is that you love yourself too much.

We are lovers of self at heart. That is who we are. That is the sinful nature that we have to be self selfish, not selfless, selfish to glorify ourselves, to take the breath that God gave us, breathing life into us, the, the bit of himself that he breathed into us so that we would come to life.

And instead we took that breath and blasphemed God with it and exalted ourselves instead.

We are all about ourselves. You do not lack self esteem. Actually you esteem yourself too much.

Even the person who is down on themselves is all about themselves. A person who just thinks

I'm an idiot. I'm no good to anybody. Nobody loves me. Everybody hates me and guess

I'll go eat worms, right? Where's their attention? Who are they focused upon themselves?

Even a person who commits suicide commits an incredibly selfish act to believe that they don't matter to anybody.

Actually this won't affect anyone. The solution to my problem is to take myself out of the equation.

A person who commits suicide has chosen a permanent response to not permanent problems.

Your situation would have changed. Circumstances would have changed, but if you've chosen to commit suicide, you can't change that.

Once you've done that, you can't take it back. A person who kills themselves has also murdered for they have taken a life that was not theirs to take.

Now I know there are questions about mental illness. That's a discussion for another time. The point that I'm simply making here is a person who has resorted to this decision was not lacking in self -esteem.

It wasn't that they did not love themselves. In fact, they love themselves too much. They loved only themselves and considered no one else's need except their own and thought their only need was to take their own life.

Or in the case of a school shooting that we just had in Santa Fe, Texas this past week, their solution is to take the life of others.

Our education system is so backwards in how we handle self -esteem for we teach students that they are complete accidents.

You go to biology class and you learn that you were born in a primordial pool.

You were just a bunch of amino acids that were floating around charged with electricity and over a period of time, millions of years, eventually those single -celled organisms became multicellular organisms, became multi -organ organisms, that became fish, that became amphibians, that became mammals, that became you.

As Frank Peretti put it, from goo to you via the zoo.

That's what we teach students in biology class and then once we get done telling them that they were actually monkeys that turned into people, then the bell rings and we say, okay, head down the hall for self -esteem class so we can teach you how to think more highly of yourself after we just told you you are complete accidents.

It should not surprise us and shock us when a student runs into a public school that is dedicated to indoctrinating students this way and thinks of his fellow classmates as completely expendable at the end of his gun because that's exactly the worldview that has been infused into these students' minds.

You don't matter in the large grand scheme of things. You were a complete accident and where you are going, you will not face any consequences for anything that you did in life.

And of course, this is not the Christian worldview in which we are supposed to look at every single human being as having been made in the image of God.

And if you murder another person, it is the same as if you had attempted to murder

God for you have destroyed that which was made in God's image.

It is hatred toward God. When you hate another person, when you destroy another person, it is.

It is the outworking in your heart of what you would desire to do to God if you were able to do that, which you cannot do.

No one is ever going to destroy God, but that is the absurdity of the sinful human heart to think that we can do that, that we can exalt ourselves to a position that is higher than the place of God.

So the Christian worldview says every single person has intrinsic value, not instrumental value.

Instrumental value means a person is only valuable if they're able to contribute to society. Intrinsic value means they are valuable because they're people and all people have been made in the image of God.

Those who are in Christ Jesus are being remade into the image of Christ.

And so we see people who are in sin desecrating the image of God, and we know that the wages of that sin is death.

And out of love, we don't want them to continue in that pattern, which will ultimately end in their destruction when they die if they do not repent.

So we take the gospel to them, the gospel of Jesus Christ, who died on the cross for our sin, who rose again from the grave so that all who believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life.

The most loving thing that you can do for another person is to give them the gospel of Christ so that they would not continue in a pattern of sinfulness that will result in their destruction.

But they will repent and be clothed with the righteousness of Christ and no longer be children of wrath, but become adopted sons and daughters of God and heirs of his eternal kingdom for all who believe in Christ Jesus.

That's the Christian worldview, that we would have love for every single human being.

From conception to natural death, no one is expendable. Everyone is deserving of Christian love and needs to hear the gospel so that they would turn from sin and know the everlasting life that has been given to us in Jesus Christ.

And that's a message that the world is quite frankly opposed to, including Bishop Michael Curry.

Even though he mentioned there the first and second greatest commandments, he has a different understanding of what those commandments mean than a person who truly understands the

Bible and worships Christ for who the Bible says that he is. Yes, Bishop Curry said a lot of Christian -esque things in his sermon at the wedding that was conducted at Windsor Castle this weekend.

But Bishop Michael Curry is an LGBTQ activist. He actively campaigns for the legalization of gay and lesbian marriage.

He thinks that if a man wants to become a woman, then he should be allowed to do that.

So Michael Curry's idea of love is to let a person be who it is that they want to be rather than turning from their sin and becoming the person that God says that you need to be in Christ Jesus.

So Michael Curry's version of love is a worldly definition of love.

It is not God's definition of love. So he can use a lot of the same vocabulary, but if you were to actually get him to define his terms, what he's preaching about is not actually love at all, for he would encourage a man or a woman to engage in behavior that God has promised that he will judge.

That is not loving. And that, again, is the very thing that Paul is talking about here with Timothy, that there are going to be those who will have an appearance of godliness, but they deny its power.

Michael Curry can use Christian -esque language and he can even quote passages of scripture, but he does not believe that the gospel is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes it.

He simply believes that you can love others enough to merit your own salvation.

When he says to love one another for God is love, and he quoted those passages from 1

John 4, 7, and 8, God is love, and so therefore the one who loves is of God, well,

Michael Curry's idea of that is to tell a man and a man that it's okay for them to sodomize one another and to deny them the passion that they have in their flesh to do that to each other would be an unloving thing to do, at least according to the definition of love that Michael Curry has adopted.

A lot of people can use these words, but when they lack definition, they have simply an appearance of godliness.

But there is no real power in the things that they say, for it leads neither to salvation nor to godliness.

Remember, we talked about this when we were in chapter 6 of 1 Timothy, that it is that which flows from the gospel of Jesus Christ that leads to godliness, therefore that which does not accord to the sound teaching of our

Lord Christ leads to ungodliness. And so those who do not have the gospel of Jesus Christ have an appearance of godliness, but they deny its power.

And Paul very explicitly says here to avoid such people. We're going to continue to talk about this particular paragraph this week, 2

Timothy 3, 1 through 9, tomorrow and also on Wednesday. Let us conclude with prayer.

Our Lord God, we thank you for the gospel that was given to us, that had started with your son,

Christ, to his apostles, to the nations, and then throughout time in the building of your church has been given also to us.

We have heard it and by your spirit, our hearts have been regenerated to believe it.

And so believing this gospel, we speak it to others. We share the gospel of Christ to others, not wanting anyone to perish, but all to come to salvation.

For it is the gospel of Jesus Christ and the message of him alone who died on the cross for our sins and rose bodily from the grave, ascended into heaven, is seated at the right hand of God, is coming back again.

It is this message of the gospel that has the power to save us from this decrepit world that will ultimately be destroyed with fire and deliver us into the imperishable kingdom of God to dwell with you in holiness forever.

God, grow us in the knowledge of the truth, that we may escape from the snare of the devil and instead do the will of God.

We are grateful to you and we praise you in the name of Jesus, amen. You've been listening to When We Understand the

Text with Pastor Gabe Hughes. We hope you are a part of the church family committed to gospel teaching, and we thank you for including us in your

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