May 28, 2017 PM Service The Only Valid Goal by Pastor Josh Sheldon

The Context of 1 Timothy and the Charge to Preach Verses 3–7

Let us put our attention once again to 1 Timothy. The message this morning will be from verses 3 -7, but as has been our practice, I'll read verses 1 -11, which is really the context out of which I've been pulling these messages.

So let's read it all, have the context before us, but pay particular attention to verses 3 -7, which is where we will preach from this morning. So 1 Timothy, chapter one. Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus, by command of God our Savior and of Christ Jesus our hope.

To Timothy, my true child in the faith, grace, mercy, and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than stewardship from God that is by faith.

But the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

Now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their mothers and fathers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.

In accordance with the glorious gospel of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. God bless the reading and now the preaching and the hearing of his word. You know, in this high-energy, hard-charging Silicon Valley, I should have no trouble selling you on the value of goals.

Goals, Direction, and the Church’s Aim

We speak of type A personalities, hard-chargers, goal-setters, goal-accomplishers, I think our area here, this Silicon Valley, has more than their share of them. Goals are what take us from here to there, wherever here may be or there might be.

Some of us in this idea, this practice of setting goals and accomplishing them, of course, some of us are better than others. Well, one person might say their goal is to retire, another might say, well, I wanna retire too, but I'm gonna set aside this much money every month and invest it in this exact way and then manage it carefully so that by this date, I'll have this many dollars.

While the others among us might say, I just wanna retire. I admire people like that, I really do. People who can map it out so carefully and so accurately and then so diligently and with that discipline, accomplish it step by step.

See, goals give purpose and direction to everything from small families to giant international corporations. Think of sports, there's goals in sports and the goal is the aim of the team. In football, it's called a touchdown.

A lesser score is even called a field goal. But even for a touchdown, you've gotta get the ball across the goal line. A basket is sometimes called a goal, as the same thing in hockey. Goals give purpose, goals give direction, goals tell you how you're gonna go from here to there because this is where you are, let's establish that and this is where we're going and this is a good place to be.

So you get the ball on the 20 yard line, your goal is to go 80 more yards and cross the goal line and get a goal. Timothy, in the verses I read, was given a goal. He's being told pretty clearly by Paul, here's where you are and here's where I need you to be.

And it's not you personally, Timothy, it's the church is in this condition and I have a goal and I'm setting you to be the one who accomplishes this goal to get the church from here to here. He's given a goal and the goal is to stop the teachers of heterodoxy from reaching their goal.

What is their goal? Their goal is to subvert the goal of the gospel. This is all about goals, this is all about accomplishment, it's all about the end of things, where things are going, what is the trajectory?

Well, Timothy, these people who are starting to have an influence here, teaching other doctrines, teaching a different gospel to borrow from Galatians, are going to send the church in a wrong direction to a different goal and you need to stop it.

They're subverting, you need to promote. The false teachers did have a goal, as often is the case with those who come into a church with a disunifying demeanor, with something that brings trouble to the church and not edification.

There is a goal to it, make no mistake, it's not just some random thing. The false teachers in Timothy's situation, their goal was endless wrangling over words, names, numbers, and the like. Paul calls this doctrine different.

It's a hetero didaskaleo, hetero, different. Didaskaleo, teaching, it's a different teaching, it's other than what was entrusted to Timothy by Paul. The word for different, the one I just told you, it's used here, it's used in verse 6 -3 of the same letter.

It seems that's the only place you find it. Paul coined this term himself, just for them. And what he's talking about here in chapter one, about this different teaching, this heterodoxy, their goal, these myths, these endless genealogies.

If the false men had a goal, it was, verse 4, to promote speculations, to stir up your insecurities, to change the focus from Christ and His cross to these pedantic and intricate speculations supposedly buried deep in the text of the Bible and extracted only by them.

Have you ever spoken to someone like that who has some deep meaning from the scripture they found out, it's buried in there, and not like in numbers and silly things with the letters, it's just this intricate thing where the cross has some allegorical meaning and it was predicted here and it was over there, and just all these things, and by the time you're done, it's like it makes, how did I miss this, but your brain is fried.

And you can never really get to the end of the simple and pure gospel. Well, that's a goal, it's just to kind of stir things up and to take focus away from Jesus Christ and what He did on the cross. The gospel, as it was handed down to the church by the apostles, and on and on in an unbroken line by God's spirit, by His preservation to us.

Well, what these men were doing, these hetero teachers, went against the church's goal. Completely different direction. What was Paul's goal, what's the goal of the church, what's the goal of the teaching?

Love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. This is what the church aims at. In preaching, in teaching, in our Bible studies, in our theology course on Sunday mornings, in your interactions with each other, this is the goal of the church.

This is the goal that Timothy is to use to, as it were, defeat the others, to get them quiet. They're not to speak anymore. We're going to change trajectory away from this other. These endless wranglings, these intricate explanations of the gospel, they just twist it all up so you don't even know who Jesus was anymore by the time they're done, away from all that and to the pure gospel.

The trustworthy saying, Christ Jesus came to die for sinners. This is what the church aims at. All this geared towards learning about God so that the church should know God's nature, his works, his person, his triune holiness, the atonement that Jesus Christ accomplished on the cross because of the mercy of God showered down upon undeserving sinners.

This is our goal, to understand this, this one gospel. The church exists because of and for the sake of the gospel and for the gospel alone. Anything that distracts from that one purpose, that one goal is prohibited.

It's to be stopped, it's to be staunched, it's to be rebuked, it's to be extricated. This is perhaps of all things that the officers of this church at the pastor and elder level do is protect the church from exactly this, as Paul told Timothy to do, to guard the church against these things.

Paul speaks of myths and genealogies. I mean, they both really describe the same thing. We don't know exactly what these were that they were teaching. And even in the context of the day, we don't have an idea of, even from the secular world, what it might have come into the church that particularly alarmed Paul.

Hendrickson suggests it was, quote, "'Man-made supplements to the law of God, "'mere myths and fables, old wives' tales "'that were Jewish in nature.'". So he sounded good. You quote this ancient rabbi, or this one who you never really quite heard of, but he had some special insight to the text and things like that, and put it forward, and you just watch that trajectory a little bit, just watch what they're saying just slightly.

Who's getting all the glory? Are you looking to the cross? Is it the gospel? Or is there ever just a little bit of you in it? Did you accomplish something? Did you make yourself right with God ever so slightly?

If you were in Sunday school this morning, you would have heard some of that, about how certain sects, certain ways of looking at matters of theology, just ever so little bit, may God, even if it's only slightly, dependent on something other than simply himself.

Those sorts of things. Myths, fables, wives' tales. They sound really, really good, and they're to be completely excised. It really is all about ego in the end. I mean, it makes me sound so smart to tell you how steeped I am in the ancient literature.

And what they do, and we've seen this here in this place, is they excite you, perhaps with some ancient church father they've discovered whose teachings were so long buried in the ground, that he ignored, as if the church was in bondage for 20 centuries, waiting for this one to unearth it and give it to us.

His premises might have been slaughtered at the Council of Nicaea, but no matter, this man who studied under a man who knew a disciple of a man who once spoke to Polycarp, the same who was taught by the Apostle John, and he says, and on, and on, and on it goes, and finally you go, where's the cross?

And perhaps we could apply this so early in this message. If you ever have that happen to you, where somebody's giving you a cross-centered message, or so it is, or so it's purported to be, and as you're listening, just ask yourself, where am I being focused?

What am I looking upon? Is he driving me to Jesus? Is he showing me the cross where alone my sins were paid for? Is he giving all the glory to God for his mercy? And credit to Jesus Christ for his work, and the Holy Spirit for making us aware of this.

Is that where this is going? What is it leading you to? Is your heart pounding with excitement as Jesus is presented? Is your spirit leaping as you hear about Christ and him crucified? This is not a subject of what this verse means to me, hermeneutic.

I am saying that the Christian carries in their bosom the spirit of Christ, and he, his spirit, will testify by bringing us back to the scriptures, the revealer of our faith and the repository of all truth.

It's a very grave risk, which as I said, we've actually faced in this place before, where these ancient truths of some church father, some esoteric one who you've never heard of before is uncovered, and some doctrine that he had that the church should have been following because he was connected to the people who knew, who once had contact with, and it goes back and back, and finally you have an apostle named, but it's not about the cross, and so it's to be rejected.

Beware of Myths, Genealogies, and Different Teaching

Verse four says that these men, they're in Ephesus, were devoted to their myths and purposeless genealogies. They were devoted to them. The word in Greek is prosecho, prosecho. It's the word Jesus uses in Matthew chapter six, verse one.

Beware, prosecho, of practicing your righteousness before other people. Paul uses this word when he said goodbye to the elders at the same church of Ephesus that Timothy is being left at. He says, pay careful attention, prosecho.

Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock. The way it's used implies that the care given to the object of focus results in something. A goal is accomplished. In this case, in the case of the false teacher, it's just the speculation.

They leave you wondering if you even know what the gospel is, they make it so complicated. But the gospel's not complicated. It's not simplistic by any stretch of the imagination, but it's not all that complicated, is it?

Just listen to what Paul says to Timothy right here in 1 Timothy. I'll just kind of fly through these without comment. Chapter one, verse 15, Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Chapter two, verse five, there is one God and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

Chapter three, verse 16, he was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on the world, taken up in glory. That's the gospel. We'll never plumb the depths of it, but the gospel itself was meant to be understood.

One of the clearest warning signs that you're hearing, a heterodoxy, a different teaching. It's just not clear. It's not pointing you straight at the goal. Christ Jesus and him crucified for your sin.

Speculations rather than the stewardship that is from God by faith, is what Paul says. This is what they're promoting, speculations, not the stewardship that is from God by faith. Stewardship, that's the word oikonomia.

It can be translated as dispensation. The idea is that theirs was from the old way of the letter, not the way of faith by the Spirit. There are people in Christianity who can reduce the grace of God and Christ Jesus to a set of rules.

Paul argued against them to the Colossians. Do not taste, do not touch, dancing is forbidden. If you go to a movie, you're gonna be blown to heck by a heavenly bolt of lightning. As you leave the theater, they can convince you that the law hangs over your head, a ticking time bomb, ready to bring down wrath upon you if you mess up just one more time.

Or it twists and it convolutes the scriptures so you don't know which way is up, much less whether you're saved or not. The stewardship entrusted to Jesus by Paul and by Paul to Timothy and Paul by command of Christ Jesus, our hope to us is not the old way of rules and letters or traditions which always seem to place men and their abilities above Christ Jesus and his accomplishment.

It is, as he writes in Romans 7, 6, a service to God not under the old written code but in the new life of the spirit. So the test is simple. The application to us is really pretty plain. What do they promote in God's people?

Is it speculations and intricate interpretations that leave you bereft of any hope of understanding? Some commentators think that Timmy's antagonists were what we call Gnostics, those who purport to have a special insight into the scriptures that you need but that you need but only they have.

But they weren't full-blown Gnostics back in Timothy's day. They weren't far from it. But look now at verse five. It actually begins with a word our ESV leaves out and we're familiar with it by now from the preaching in Romans and it should be there.

It's that two-letter Greek word, de, which means but. Verse five begins with but, saying as opposed to that, this. But the aim of our charge is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.

Love, Good Conscience, and Sincere Faith

Where their goal was to foment self-doubting insecurity about the gospel in you, Paul's goal, what our goal must be is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. You see, false teachers cannot preach from love.

The ones Timothy was set against probably made people feel like they'd never understand God because they made it so convoluted. Today, they promote health and welfare, your best life now, these sorts of things.

They cannot give you the wounds of a friend. They might leave you feeling wonderful about yourself and the possibilities that you might unleash if you just had this or that sort of faith. If you believe with the faith of a mustard seed, you might speak your wealth into existence and send all your illnesses away.

I can preach to you about great wounding. I can preach to your great wounding, and that would be good, but you have to ask why. Because the work of this pulpit, whoever stands here at this pulpit, the work of it is love from a pure heart.

If the words I speak are true, then they are powerful words. And why is that, because of me? No, can't be because of me, because of God's spirit who attends his word faithfully preached with power. Someone came to me after my message a few weeks back when we were preaching at the beginning of Romans 8, about there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, and told me how, they told me later that they were convicted by what I said as I preached the truth of the word.

They were convicted of their spiritual pride, pride of being more convicted of their sin than other people, whom they had judged to be less spiritual because they didn't take their sin as seriously as they did.

I didn't make that application explicitly. But it's love from a pure heart, it's a sincere faith, it's a desire of your pastor, people who stand at this pulpit who know you, not hired guns, not hetero teachers, who preach the word faithfully with a voice that Lord willing you hear.

And therefore the wounds you get from this place, from this pulpit are the wounds of a friend. You can ask yourself, when you're hearing someone who you're not intimately familiar with, as you are with me, or with Conley, or with Steve, or the three who stand at this pulpit, is this person wounding me to my good?

Is it just these commonalities that they threw out there that would work in any place, in any time? Good conscience comes not from the law, not from it in any way. The law only incites in us a riot of sin.

So perverse are we that that which is righteous and holy and good becomes nothing more than a highway to the very things that it prohibits. And so with conscience as aching, men join in the Romans 118 task of suppressing truth and forcing away the blows that it gives us.

So where Paul writes of a good conscience, he doesn't mean one that is confident, is free of any sin or wrongdoing. That'd be impossible. He means a conscience stirred and softened by God's spirit and ready to hear his rebuke and make the necessary corrections.

We call it conviction, a process engaged only by good consciences. And that's the goal of the preaching, is a good conscience. Doesn't mean our behavior is in every way, at every point, perfect. We know that can't be.

But a good conscience is one that is sensitive and open to the word of God and allows its wounds to come in and then make the corrections. We're not sure where the different teachers came from to the Ephesus church.

We're not sure if they were people who had been in that congregation for a while or if there were itinerants who came in and started to have influence. I sort of think the latter. Though there's no way you can really hold too firmly to that because it's just unknown, but it seems to me the latter.

It seems to me that these are men who preach things that excited a guilty conscience, bad feelings, a focus away from the cross and what I've done wrong made me feel like I can't open my Bible and understand anything God would have to say but the people who didn't really know the flock to whom they preached.

We all listen to preachers on the radio, don't we? I mean, I do. When I drive home, there's something I like to hear, especially on the way to work in the morning. If I leave late, I'll be on the road at 7 .30.

I can listen to Alistair Begg. He's one of my favorites. I can listen to my edification and I enjoy listening to him, but you know, he's not my pastor. He doesn't love me except insofar as all Christians love the people of God.

We can learn from men like that. We can be encouraged, we can be edified, but love from a pure heart and a good conscience was meant to be known in closer quarters than a radio or a TV broadcast. MP3 and iPod and all the rest of that, they have their use, but they're no substitute for one-on-one fellowship and from hearing the word of God in a church from a man who knows you.

Would that be me or the other men who stand here? Maybe it was their distance from the people that had Paul call themselves to God. Maybe it was just certain persons. Certain persons, he doesn't name them.

Others he names. He says, these men have done wrong, and he names them. We'll get to those names in a couple of weeks. And that's why I think these were the itinerants, people who didn't really know and love the flock, who couldn't preach to you by knowing you and you hearing the loving words of a pastor, a shepherd, an under-shepherd of Christ who really knows you and loves you.

He says they were just certain persons in verses three and six. In verse five where Paul speaks of our aim, what is our goal? Our goal, our aim, our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and sincere faith.

Faith comes last, but not because it's of less importance. It couldn't be. Without faith, it's impossible to please God. But because, as Calvin puts it here, the law was given that it might instruct us in faith, which is the mother of a good conscience and of love.

See, faith is the starting point of the Christian life and the wellspring of our hope in Christ and growth into his image. And then he says love, love being the fulfillment of the law, love of God displayed and proved by love of neighbor.

Anything that doesn't lead us there is a false use of the law. So look at verses six and seven there, please, in 1 Timothy. Here's our strangers. Here's the heteroteachers. Our certain persons, by swerving from these, from the goal set forth in verse five, from love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith, these persons, swerving from those, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions.

Swerving from the Gospel and Wandering into Vain Discussion

How do we say that today? What is it? They don't know what they're talking about. They want to seem by men, they want to be seen by men as smart, sophisticated, and eloquent, but they end up swerving off the path of pure love, of good conscience, of faith, and they wander instead into useless, vain, light, meaningless, unhelpful speculations.

No understanding, no knowledge, only this overbearing confidence like the king who thought himself king and found himself magnificently attired and yet, in fact, had no clothes. Swerving means to miss the mark.

It's an interesting word. It's not the word for it, but it's the same definition as sin. Sin means literally to miss the mark. You can read in Judges about the Benjamites who could throw a stone from a sling, I forget the distance, and they could hit a hare's breath without ever sinning.

It's literally the word used, the word for sin in Hebrew, without ever missing the mark. This word for swerve isn't the word for sin, but it's defined as missing the mark. So they've wandered, and wandered is a word that means to turn aside, which is another way to speak of sin.

I think this is what Paul getting at without using the word sin is what he means. They swerve, they miss the mark. They've turned aside from what is right and good, which is another way to say they've sinned.

Whereas repentance is to turn aside away from sin, 180 degrees and go a different direction, they've turned aside and gone towards it. The first word, they've swerved, is an active word. They intentionally missed the clear mark of the gospel.

Remember verse four, they devote themselves, so they are culpable. They did this knowingly. The second word, to wander, is passive. So it's something like this, with intention and purpose, they minimize or set aside altogether the gospel and are then the passive recipients of the due reward, which is vain discussions, discussions that get you nowhere.

Guarding the Church from False Teaching

So what is all this to us? I said when we started 1 Timothy that it is as much to pastors as it is to congregants. This letter, 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus, they're called the pastoral epistles because they tell pastors how to be pastors.

As much as, as we said a few weeks ago when we started this, as much as it tells members of the church how to be members, there's a mutual responsibility as we go through these letters, or through this letter.

For us, for you, take care of who you listen to. There's too much on the radio, too much radio preaching that is just sheer nonsense. Much on TV is just downright blasphemous, modern books are often fluffier than vapor.

We need to ask whether it's a book or a radio program or a TV show, even this pulpit, we need to ask, you need to ask and hold this pulpit accountable. Am I hearing about Jesus Christ? Am I hearing the words of my Savior?

Is repentance for sin and faith in towards God by repentance towards Jesus Christ being preached and taught and made clear? Do I leave this place knowing that I am saved, knowing that God saved a guilt-ridden sinner because of his mercy?

Who's receiving the praise? Ask yourself whether your conscience is ever being pricked here. If your love for Christ and his church is aroused by what you take in, whether it's here, from the radio, from the TV, from the books we read, where are they leading us, what is the goal?

Is it consistent with verse five in 1 Timothy 1? Love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. We've all heard the expression, I think, if you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time.

We have an aim, we have a goal. It's given to us by the apostolic authority of Paul, by command of Christ Jesus, our hope, and it's just what I've been saying, a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.

Do we have those? If you have Jesus Christ, the answer has to be yes, and amen, and thank God. Because when the Holy Spirit comes upon us, he gives a new heart. And I believe that what Paul's describing here is that work.

So what is the gospel task of this church is to promote what God has given us already, this heart, this conscience, this faith, this gift of God, this faith that believes that Jesus Christ died for sinners of whom I am the chief, this faith that believes, as we go to the communion table in a little while, that the elements that are before us are symbolic, and they're only bread and wine, they're only their constituent elements.

A chemist could take them apart and give us a long list of what it actually is, what makes it up. And our mind can understand that, but our faith says the bread is Christ's body, which is for me, broken for me, personally.

As if Christ Jesus, as his body was being battered and broken and tortured, he said, I am carrying in me John or Paul or Mary or Sue, so that their sins will be answered before God. Faith says that this is what the broken bread means to me, that God's body, that Christ's body, broken for me personally, with Christ knowing for whom he was going through the torture.

That's a pure heart, that's a good conscience, that's sincere faith. These are a gift of God that look at the wine and say, just the tiniest little thimble full shot of grape juice or wine, whichever you take, that's all it is to the mind.

Our faith said this is Jesus Christ's life, his blood poured out for me. So we come to this table, and each week we read these three requirements of those who would come to this table. Me in this place, it's the community of faith that we're calling to.

It's community of faith. Is your faith in Jesus Christ, the eternal, only begotten son of God? Him, him alone, the cross, the cross alone, that's first. Is that your faith? If this is your faith, have you been baptized, properly baptized?

I say the word without embarrassment. I mean upon profession of faith, under the water, and raised again in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Is your faith in Jesus Christ? Have you been baptized in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit?

And finally, those who have been brought into the family of faith, the household of faith, have joined themselves to a house of faith, to a church, to a local, distinct assembly. And so we say you have your faith in Jesus Christ, you've been baptized upon profession of faith, and you are a member in good standing of a gospel-preaching church.

And then we ask you to partake with us. These are the gifts of God, the pure heart, the good conscience, the sincere faith, all this, Lord willing, confirmed in us and to us as we partake of the communion of God by his Spirit.

Bless us as we honor his word, and obey his word as often as you do this in remembrance of me. So John will close us with a hymn, and then Conley will come up and help me to serve, and we will partake together.

80 or eight? Two 80s. Thank you.