WWUTT 712 Wandering Off into Myths?

Some people just don't want to hear the sound teaching of the gospel. They don't want to be convicted of their sin. They don't want to have to go through the hard work of learning these deep truths. So instead, they will wander off into myths when we understand the text.

You're listening to When We Understand the Text, committed to the sound teaching of the Word of God. For questions and comments, email whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com. And don't forget our website, www .utt .com.

Here's our host, Pastor Gabe.

Paul’s Charge to Preach the Word in Season and Out of Season

Thank you, Becky. We continue our study of 2 Timothy chapter 4. Today, I'll be reading verses 1 through 5. The Apostle Paul writes to his servant Timothy, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, preach the Word.

Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths.

As for you, always be sober-minded. Endure suffering. Do the work of an evangelist. Fulfill your ministry. Over the course of my life, some of the best advice that I have been given, and I only call it advice for lack of a better word, but the best advice that I've received are those pieces of advice that were given as imperatives.

It wasn't stuff like, hey, here's a suggestion for you. If you do this, then you will get this result. Or somebody saying, I've learned in life that if I do this, I will get this. But some of the most meaningful pieces of advice were given as a directive, as we see Paul instructing Timothy with here at the start of this chapter.

And remember that Paul considered Timothy a son in the faith, and Paul like his father. And so we have, in chapter 4, verse 1, Paul saying, I charge you in the presence of God. This is not Paul giving a suggestion.

This is him giving a command to Timothy to follow in faithfulness to God, whom we worship, whom we are going to have to give, to whom we will have to give an account on the day of judgment, which is exactly what Paul is laying out here in the first two verses of this chapter.

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. There was somebody who told me a long time ago that preaching the gospel is not a model of ministry.

It's not simply a model of ministry. You might consider that a model as a term. It may apply to a particular style of teaching. But preaching the gospel, I was told, is the only way to preach. If you are not preaching the gospel, get out of the pulpit.

You don't deserve to be there. And that was not given to me as a suggestion. It was not handed to me as, here's the way that I would advise you preaching. It was said, this is how you must preach. And I have loved that advice and have tried to follow that advice and the ministry that I've been given by God.

And like I said, I use the term advice for lack of a better term. I tend to think that those imperative statements, those instructions that are given in that way, are something a little bit more than a suggestion, which is the way that we consider that word advice to apply.

So Paul is instructing Timothy here that he must preach the word. This is not about Timothy giving his opinion. This is not about Timothy giving his political perspectives or his views on certain social ills.

This is about preaching what God has said in his word. And as I've said to you before, this would include the entire Old Testament, because that was mostly what was being taught in the churches. They had the Old Testament, so they would show from the Old Testament how Christ fulfilled the law and the prophets.

But many of the churches also had collections of the letters that had been written by the apostles. One of the things that Votibachum had pointed out last week as he was teaching us from this particular section is he said that this word was hanging by a thread.

The gospel in its written form was very fragile. It could be less than a generation and it would disappear. And so Paul urging Timothy to preach what had been taught by the apostles, to hold fast to it and teach only this.

Do not impose your own opinions and views and extra theologies and speculations apart from what has been delivered in the apostolic ministry. And Timothy was being charged to continue that. He was the next generation of that.

He himself was not an apostle. Paul was an apostle, but Timothy represented that next generation of preachers after the apostles who were going to continue to proclaim the gospel to the world. There weren't printing presses.

We didn't have an abundance of scrolls and manuscripts at this particular time. It was mostly oral tradition. But as Timothy would preach, he would remember the sound doctrine that came from the apostle Paul and the other apostles that he had learned from.

Preach the word, be ready in season and out of season. There is never a time in which this word should not be preached. Reprove, rebuke, and exhort with complete patience and teaching. Even though the word of God was fragile at this particular time, like I said, it could disappear within the next generation.

Nonetheless, God was in control and he was the one that would ensure that his word would endure. And so in this way, Timothy was to have patience as he taught. Not panicking, not trying to take matters into his own hands, but trusting the Lord and being obedient with that which he was entrusted to take care of.

The Time Is Coming When People Will Not Endure Sound Teaching

Verse 3, Paul says, for the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching. And that time is now. That time was definitely in the present in which Timothy was teaching at the time that Paul had even delivered this letter to him.

But it wasn't going to get any better. In fact, things were going to get more difficult. You still had the destruction of the temple that was coming up in 70 AD. And then the church would go through some of the hardest years of persecution that it would ever go through.

Those first 300 years, all the way up until Constantine became emperor and ended up making Christianity the official religion of Rome. So in that period of time, there was a massive amount of persecution.

And while the church spread rapidly in those first 40 years of the preaching of the gospel, eventually, things would not progress as rapidly as they had in that first generation. And so Paul is warning Timothy that a time is coming.

People are not going to endure sound teaching, even within the churches. In Acts chapter 20, Paul warned the elders of the Ephesian church. And again, this is where Timothy is teaching from, that church in Ephesus.

That's where he's been appointed to be and continue to proclaim the word of God. Paul warned the elders there in Ephesus that there would be wolves that would arise even from among them. There may have been guys in his presence as he was saying goodbye to those elders.

There may have been guys right there in front of him who were going to abandon sound teaching and start going astray. As a matter of fact, we have all indication that that is what has happened, which is why Paul has sent Timothy to Ephesus to teach the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ.

As he said at the start of 1 Timothy chapter 1, do not let anyone teach any different doctrine, but only that which flows from the sound words of our Lord Christ. The time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions.

As a pastor and as somebody who has warned my congregation about false teachers, I've had people come up and ask me, well, what about the people whom the false teachers are leading astray? When they get to heaven and on the day of judgment, is God going to give some people a pass because they were led astray by false teachers instead of hearing the truth of the gospel?

They listen to these lies. So the teachers will be judged, but maybe there will be some grace or pardon that will be given to the hearers, those that were lied to by those false teachers. And I said, no, everyone is going to have to give an account for what they believed, in whom they put their faith, whether they listen to the truth of the gospel that was proclaimed by sound teachers of the word or they listen to false teachers because according to what Paul is saying here in 2 Timothy 4, people listen to false teachers because they want to.

That's exactly what it is they want to hear. I want to listen to the prosperity gospel because that's what I want. I want to believe that God is going to make me healthy and wealthy. I want to listen to the social gospel because I want to believe that if I go out and do these things and do love and charity works in the world, well, that will be enough to affect my salvation.

I want to believe that my doing something has something to do with the salvation that I'm going to receive and earn. People go after false gospels because they want to. And they follow these false teachers because the teachers are telling them the things that they want in their flesh.

That's what makes those false teachers so attractive because they're telling them the things that they want to hear. So Paul is saying that those people who are still so fallen in their flesh to have not been transformed by the Holy Spirit of God, they're not going to endure sound teaching.

They're not going to listen to you teach the true words of the Lord Christ. They might have some form of religion or Christianity, quote-unquote Christianity, that uses the name of Christ or calls upon the true God in some way, but it's going to be a distortion of sound teaching.

It will be unsound teaching. They have itching ears, and they want teachers who will scratch those itching ears for them, just like a dog wants you to scratch its ears. They're going to be acting just like that, and they will accumulate for themselves, meaning there will be more than one teacher.

They're just going to find all kinds of teachers that will appeal to them the things that they want to hear, accumulating for themselves teachers to suit their own passions. I want to hear somebody tell me that the passions in my flesh are okay, that I can go entertain these things, and still believe that I can get to heaven.

I want to believe that I can be a sexually immoral person. I want to believe that I can still hold this bitterness toward somebody else. I don't actually have to reconcile with this other person. It's totally fine for me to hold this grudge against this person.

I want to believe that I can do that, that I'm justified in doing that, and I can still get to heaven someday, even though our Lord Christ said in Matthew chapter 6 that if you do not forgive others their trespasses when they sin against you, neither will your heavenly Father forgive you your trespasses.

Some people love bitterness. It's weird, but they do. They love to hold their grudges, and they do not want to be reconciled with those persons that they are holding grudges against. I once had to confront a family whom I loved deeply, whose marriage was horrible.

It had gone horribly sour. Then I had to sit down with this couple, and I had to tell them, your marriage is rotten. It is in shambles, and you're just going on doing a charade, making everybody think that everything is okay, or pretending that there's nothing for you to fix when you have to fix this.

The problems that they had in their marriage was affecting their children as well. The wife exploded at me and said that I was being ungracious and uncharitable, and she stormed out the door, and I never saw her again.

They would rather have had the bitterness that they had toward one another than do the work that was necessary to fix the problems in their marriage. They were so bitter toward one another that they did not want to fix those things.

They would rather go to another church where somebody was not going to confront them about the problems in their marriage. We, not just myself, but other members of the church, tried to show them that we loved them and that we wanted to walk with them through this thing that they needed to do, but both of them had sins that they needed to confess.

They needed to ask each other for forgiveness. They needed to forgive one another in order to begin the process of healing and mending the brokenness that was in their marriage, broken because of their sin against God and against one another, but they did not want to do it.

There was only one conversation. It was one sit down and saying, you've got a messed up marriage and you need to get this fixed, and they simply would not put up with it. Walked out the door and I never saw them again.

There are some people who just love their sin and they would rather find teachers that would let them revel in that sin or teachers that didn't know them as well. They could go to another church and the people there don't know us as well.

They don't know the problems that we have in our marriage, so now we're able to continue to covertly go along with not having to confront these problems and they become comfortable with their sin. They don't want to have to admit that they're wrong.

They don't want to have to love each other the way that Christ has commanded that we love one another in our marriages and so they would leave the church where they had been for so long and had so many friends and instead they would go after teachers to suit their own passions.

Wandering Away from the Truth into Prosperity Light

And then verse four, they will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. Voti talked about this last week as well. The person who attends a gospel preaching church where the gospel is being proclaimed every Sunday, where the pastor is teaching deep truths that settle deep into the soul and the person goes home and does the Bible reading and they do their devotionals and they pray regularly and they're attempting to lead their family and the church is encouraging and admonishing one another as the saints should and eventually that person gets to a point where they're like, you know what, this is a lot of hard work.

This is tough and I don't want to do this. The way that I'm feeling convicted for my sin, I don't want to feel that way anymore. Let me go to the church where the messages are softer, where I don't have to do so much work, where I don't have to learn about all these doctrines.

Let's not talk about doctrine and theology. Just give me the feel good sermon and so they wander from the truth. They do not endure sound teaching and instead they wander into myths and I think the way that you will see this most commonly in the church in America, the evangelical church in America at least, is going to be in those kinds of sermons that I've referred to as prosperity light.

It may not be blatant prosperity theology like you'd hear from Joyce Meyer or from Joel Osteen or from TD Jakes or somebody like that, but it is in substance very similar to a prosperity gospel message.

I can give you an example just from the Southern Baptist Convention last week, the convention sermon that was delivered by Kai Bauman. He preached from Ezekiel 37 and he said that, he used that passage to talk about how God is going to breathe new life into your marriage.

He's going to breathe new life into your job. He's going to breathe new life into your hopes and dreams even though those things seemed dead to you, just like God breathed life into the valley of dry bones and they stood up and became an exceedingly great army, so he's going to breathe life into these things in your life that you previously thought were dead.

That's prosperity light. It's not the gospel. It has nothing to do with Jesus dying on the cross and rising again from the grave for the forgiveness of sins so that by repenting of sin and following him, you are justified before the Father and you have entrance into the eternal kingdom.

That gospel message isn't in there. Instead, it's about how following Jesus is going to make your life better. There is no promise in scripture that is given to us to that conclusion at all. As a matter of fact, Jesus gives us the warning that following him is harder than doing what it is that the world is doing.

That's the broad road that the world is on and many are going to find it because that's the easy way, according to Jesus in Matthew 7, but narrow is the road that leads to life and long is the way and few will find it.

Or in Luke chapter 14, where Jesus said, consider the cost. If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. Is the preaching that's coming from our pulpits? Is it as tough as those words that came from Christ right there in Luke chapter 14?

Or are we hearing those soft, fluffy, prosperity light sermons, the most common sermon that's preached in America that's moralizing the text and telling you how following Jesus is going to make your life a little bit easier in some of these areas?

That's not gospel preaching and it promises us something that it cannot deliver on. There is nothing in the Bible that says that Jesus is going to make our life better. What it does say is that if you believe in Jesus on the day you die, you will be with him in his eternal kingdom forever where there is no more death, no more crying, no more tears, no more pain, no more suffering, no more temptation.

For the former things will have passed away. You have that guarantee as a follower of Jesus, but there is no guarantee that your life will get any easier. Folks, this world has fallen. We should not expect it to get any better.

It's getting progressively worse and the only deliverance that we have from this world is in Jesus Christ. Faith in Christ and we are promised that he will raise us up on the last day. That's the word that we need because that's the word and the only word that delivers.

A Prayer for Steadfast Faith in Christ

Our Lord God, we pray that you would keep us steadfast in the faith. May we not have itching ears and chasing after teachers that will suit our own passions, but let the passion that is stirred in our heart be for Christ.

And what we want to hear proclaimed is Christ, that we may be made more like Christ, that we may draw nearer to Christ and that we would be delivered from this world into your heavenly kingdom. Come quickly, Lord Jesus, we pray.

Amen.

Pastor Gabe keeps a regular blog sharing personal thoughts, alerting readers to false teachers and offering commentary on the church and social issues. You can find a link to the blog through our website, www .utt .com.

Thank you for listening and join us again tomorrow as we continue our study in God's word. When we understand the text.