Rebels & Loyal Servants

2 Timothy 3 and the Great Apostasy in the Last Days

Please remain standing. Look at the handout or open your scriptures to 2 Timothy chapter 3, starting at verse 1. We'll actually be reading through chapter 5 verse 5 because in order to keep with the handout's organization from the chiastic structure from Pastor Kaiser.

So chapter 3 verse 1. Good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away. For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Now, as Janice and Jambres resisted Moses, so do these also resist the truth, men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith. But they will progress no further, for their folly will be manifest to all as theirs also was.

But you have carefully followed my doctrine, manner of life, purpose, faith, long suffering, love, perseverance, persecutions, afflictions, which happened to me at Antioch, at Iconium, at Lystra. What persecutions I endured and out of them all the Lord delivered me.

Yes, and all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil men and imposters will grow worse and worse, deceiving and being deceived. But you must continue in the things which you have learned and been assured of, knowing from whom you have learned them, and that from childhood you have known the holy scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus.

All scripture is given by inspiration of God and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work.

I charge you, therefore, before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and teaching.

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables.

But you be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. You may be seated. We have arrived at the middle of the book. Verses one through nine of chapter three deal with a great apostasy that occurs in the church in history.

It has occurred.

It was the great apostasy that occurred in the first century at the end of the old covenant and sandwiched beside it is the section that deals with being a faithful minister and doing faithful ministry in the face of that great apostasy.

So, we've been considering the idea of faithful ministry in a negative world, faithful ministry in trash world, faithful ministry when the evangelical church is in total disarray, and we consider that still, but we need to remember the original historical context and consider that as well.

The Last Days of the Old Covenant and the Rise of Perilous Times

The chapter three, verse one. But know this, that in the last days, perilous times will come. Most Americans have been trained to read this as referring to the last days just before Christ. And what Paul is talking about here is the last days of the old covenant, that the last days that would affect Timothy and his church that he's writing to.

And these last days would be ended with great persecution that they're already in the midst of, significant persecution, apostasy by many who are in the Jewish old covenant church as a total overwhelming rejection of Christ, of the remaining that had not come in, some that would leave and suffer martyrdom that had been occurring, and then also that there would be significant falling away of the church membership in the new covenant churches.

So in the last days, perilous times will come for men who will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters may go on. This is a long list. There is activity that occurs here. And you remember, let me let me help you to consider why horrific vices come from the flesh and God can simply not restrain evil.

He can he can easily cause men to do great evil out of their own natures. But also. Wicked spirits, demons can be used to bring about horrifying evil by men, the doctrines of demons can stir men up to frenzies and demons can possess unbelievers and cause them to be instruments of great wickedness.

One thing you'll remember that occurred during the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ is he was casting out demons like it was going out of style. One incident, he casts out a legion of demons out of a single guy.

One dude, legion of demons. There was a heavy concentration of demonic activity in the promised land during the time of the ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ. And you may remember that the Lord Jesus Christ also taught this.

He said, you know. When demons are cast out of a place. The place could be set in order, but there's this danger, right, if the Holy Spirit doesn't take residence there, what happens? The demons come back with seven friends, right, so now you have more of them and they take possession of the old dwelling again.

So if you have widespread, overwhelming, enormous numbers of demons being cast out by the Lord Jesus Christ and his apostles during his earthly ministry, and there was already a heavy concentration of demonic activity going on there for those that didn't believe after they had demons cast out.

You would see that there would be an even larger number of demons returning. So the kind of demonic activity and ferocity that you see in the last days of Judea before Jerusalem is destroyed and the temple destroyed is horrifying.

The accounts that you read from Josephus and others are filled with wild activities of.

These people.

You also seem to have demonic activity concentrated in places of political power. And so Rome, being the imperial capital, would also be a place where there's extensive demonic activity. And so demonic empowering of emperors that fancy themselves gods and of false teachers of religion that then is stirred up into wild persecution of the church would also encourage apostasy by all those who are nominally, in name only, Christians.

And so the great apostasy and the great tribulation came simultaneously and together. In the last days, perilous times will come. Why? Because men will be lovers of themselves. One of the great heresies of old is to love yourself more than you love God, to value yourself more than you value God, because that could only happen if you believed that God isn't really God, but really you're God.

And that was Satan's conceit, that he sought to pass off on Eve as a gullible woman. He said, you will be as gods in the day that you eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. This is a special way, Eve, for you to get knowledge as though you were God.

How does God get knowledge? God gets knowledge or he doesn't get knowledge. He determines truth. He is truth. He eternally is truth. He doesn't learn. And so this lie of finding this special way to be the determiner of truth, that's a self love that's really a self hatred.

Men will be lovers of themselves. You know, we actually have a duty to love ourselves. We are commanded to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. And the love of neighbor and the love of self are joined, you know, liberals are known for saying this, you know, you can't love others until you love yourself.

Well, no, you always love yourself in the sense that you always want what you think is good for you. That's unavoidable. That's, as a rational creature, you can't avoid that. But not everybody actually knows what's good for them, right?

And so you actually can't love your neighbor at all until you actually know what is your.

Good.

And so the love of self, a rightly, a right view of the love of self, an enlightened self interest, understands that God is greater than me. That he is truth. He's the determiner of truth. And furthermore, that the way I seek my own good is by seeking the glory of God, seeking to know him, seeking to possess his glory, seeking to enjoy him.

That's how I seek my good. And if I love myself that way, I'm going to also understand that I should love other people and seek their interests. I should love my neighbor as myself. And that's how I pursue my self interest.

The self love that's condemned here is viewing yourself as greater than God and not loving your neighbor, not seeing your neighbor as valuable, not pursuing their interest as well as your own. And so this self love, there's three views of how we should deal with self interest in terms of the philosophical history of man.

One is called altruism that says you should totally be unconcerned with your own self interest. And that's not scriptural. The Bible constantly appeals to don't do that, you'll get punished. Do this, you'll get rewarded.

So what's happening there? Is Jesus just like setting clever traps?

Ha ha.

If you think about the reward, I just encourage you to think about, then you're sinning. No, that's not what's going on. He's encouraging us to think about our self interest. Altruism is false. We should not be absolutely selfless in the sense of being unconcerned about self interest.

There's another thing called egotism. This is on the other side. OK, so egotism is the idea that you should pursue your own self interest without any concern for the self interest of others. That's egotism.

There's a T.

And that view is clearly wrong. The Bible plainly teaches to love our neighbor as ourselves and to love God with all of our.

Being.

So the Bible teaches egoism, no T. Which is that middle view. And it's the view that you should pursue your true self interest. And so your true self interest is to seek the glory of God. And your true self interest is to seek the good of your neighbor.

And that's how you seek your good. The law of God teaches you. It provides an instruction manual for you to obtain your own self interest. Lovers of themselves are people who are behaving as egotists and treating themselves like they're God.

Rather than doing what God commands, they're obeying the commandment of Satanism. Do what you will. Follow your heart. That idea, the do what you will, that is the love of self without concern for duties and the proper, true love of self.

Lovers of money make money their God. Remember what Jesus calls money worshiped? It's mammon. So lovers of money. So now you make religion into a servant of money. You make people into means to get money.

And so people are disposable and money is what you're going to get. Boasters, you know, that idea that you go around claiming you're super awesome. Boasters. And also, here's what I'm going to do. Being proud, having an improper view of yourself, an improperly elevated view of yourself.

And, you know, we can pride sometimes. We think pride is merely boasting. We need to remember this. Pride also takes the form of a sort of a conceded false humility. It refuses to serve because it refuses to acknowledge gifting.

You have a duty not only to avoid vain boasting, but you also have a duty to rightly recognize the gifts that God has given to you and to put them to good use. If you don't recognize the gifts that God has given to you, you are a wicked and lazy, lazy servant who is taking the talents of gold that God has given to you, digging a hole in the ground, throwing them in there, covering it up with dirt and saying, I wasn't given anything.

How could I possibly accomplish anything? I mean, other than the like backpack full of gold sitting right there, I have zero resources. What could you possibly expect from me? That is one type of pride, a false humility.

And the other type is this idea that you think that you are better than everybody else. You don't recognize the giftings of other people. You despise their value. And you think I have the power to do what I want.

Blasphemers, those who speak falsehood against God. Lovers of self, lovers of money, boasters, the proud, the blasphemers. Disobedient to parents, rebels, the idea of rebellion. Now, this can be used as a stand in for rebellion against all authority, but the parent is the closest.

And the idea that mother gave birth to you, your parents provided for you to have clothing and dwelling place and food and drink, educated you and provided you with a station in life to prepare you to be able to go into the world.

Parents are those who are in authority that have the best and strongest and broadest claim on your loyalty of any authorities except for God. And to be disobedient to parents is not something that we would in our culture think of as as big of a deal.

As it fits in this list, we get lovers of selves, lovers of money, boasters, proud blasphemers, disobedient to parents, kind of falls flat to the American ear. And that's because our culture has wrongly emphasized equality in everything, not just equality of essence.

Yes, you're equally human. We're all equally human with each other. Yes, we're equal under law. But we do not all have equal gifting. We do not all have equal station. We do not all have equal authority.

We're out of the same age. And so the recognition of legitimate authority and honor, disobedience to parents should be a thing that is horrifying and tragic, an indicator of future great evils to manifest themselves.

Unthankful, unholy, unthankful, unthankful to other people, unthankful to God. Who provides life. Everything we receive comes from the hand of God. And to be unthankful, to be unholy, not focus on the glory of God.

Why do you exist? What's your purpose? Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. You're going to glorify God whether you want to or not. You can do it while enjoying God and you can do it while maximally not enjoying anything in hell.

These are the two ways you can glorify God ultimately. The first one is better. Take my word for it. And so if you have those two paths and you can glorify God by enjoying him, then being holy is the path for that.

It's being focused on his glory. To be unfocused on his glory, to be unholy, to not be set apart for the service of God, to not keep yourself from filth. Is to set yourself on a path to be the background that helps to show the greatness of the mercy of God.

His justice against wickedness. We just read in Psalm 5, how God hates the wicked. Remember who you are saved from. We talk about being saved. You're saved from God. God has wrath against evil. And Christ came to make payment for our sin debt and to propitiate the Father, to turn his wrath away and to turn his favor toward us.

And so this idea of the propitiation, the turning away of the wrath of God and the turning toward a favor. This work that is the grounds for God's favor. It's something that should make it so that we are focused on the glory of God.

And so God's justice is displayed in his punishment of the wicked and his rewarding of righteous angels. And his mercy is displayed in his giving the elect forgiveness and reward because of the work of Christ.

And to be holy, to be focused on the glory of God and to be a counter display to this wickedness. Is the call of the church to be unloving, to not care about the well-being of neighbor or to care about the glory of God.

To be unforgiving. You know, Jesus is teaching that, you know, if you have been forgiven an enormous debt, all your sins against God and then you will not forgive some minor offense that somebody else commits against you.

And all sins against you are minor offenses compared to the weight of the sins that you've been forgiven by God. To be unforgiving when people repent is a great wickedness that leads to fracturing and hatred and destruction and brittleness in horrible communities.

One of the criticisms that I think is very effective against wokeism has been this idea that there's no forgiveness in it. Are you white? Well, whether or not you directly had ancestors that owned slaves, you're participating in a system of privilege that's built upon slavery and racism.

And so, you ought to feel guilty about it. Okay, what can I do? I mean, what can I do to end this thing?

Nothing.

What can I do to get rid of that?

Nothing.

What can I do to make it right?

Nothing.

There's no forgiveness. It's all bad news, no good news. A philosophy that has no place for forgiveness is a philosophy that's trying to make earth into hell and not heaven. Slanderers, the breaking apart of societies, the tearing down of people's reputations, and not even with true things, falsehood.

Slander destroys community, encourages apostasy and breaking apart. Without self-control, these people are not governing themselves. And if you can't govern yourself, you can't govern a household, you can't govern a church, you can't govern a state.

Your rule becomes a monstrous rule. You're a tyrant to yourself. If you look at yourself and you think, you know, I don't want to be governed by me. If you look at yourself and you're frustrated with your own inability to govern yourself, then think about how awful it would be to be under your authority and not be.

Without self-control, without self-government, there is no good government. The absence of self-control in these people is a horrifying thing.

To be brutal.

If you will not control yourself to limit the power you use, the opposite of gentleness is brutality. An uncontrolled venting of rage and power.

Brutality.

We associate with savagery and the lack of civilization this uncontrolled venting of power. No discernment of targets. No limitation on the force. Think about back in Genesis with Lamech, who says, okay, Cain's curse was seven times.

Mine is 77 times, or whatever he said. A lot. It was a lot. This idea that he's going to go after and he's going to take vengeance. Where if somebody strikes him, he'll kill them. This over-exercise, not even of justice, but of brutality in response to harms.

Sometimes not even response to harms. Just the venting and transferring of angers and manifestations of power. There are people who are violent without reason. Not towards you anyways. Maybe they're angry at somebody else and they just take out their anger on you as a different target.

This transfer. When you have unstable people. When you have people around you that exercise violence in a way that doesn't make any sense. That kind of brutality makes it so that you can't trust people.

You can't be around people. It makes it so the cost of cooperation is too high.

Why?

Because there's this horrific risk of brutal responses. And so the duty of good men, in large part, is to restrain the horrifically wicked. The huge outbursts of wickedness that occur in the world must be restrained.

The state is instituted by God to exercise coercive power to restrain the horrors of wickedness in evil men. That will not control themselves, will not govern themselves. And the church uses the keys to restrain evil and to move evil out.

And to allow for holy space, holy place, holy people, holy time. To allow for orderly and holy interaction. Despisers of good. The people that sneer at and detract and dislike and discountenance things that are good.

It's amazing how different a culture can be just based upon the subtle pressures of a culture. Is everyone around you smile and approve and get more friendly when you do something good? Or do they sneer at it, look down on it, and think of you as a goody two-shoes?

I'll tell you what, depending on the general reaction of the people there, one way or the other is going to dramatically shape the behaviors of those people across time. We must be those who value what is good and hate brutality and love the control of strength and the focusing of it to perform good works.

And to give proper and appropriate responses. Traitors. Think about traitors. The greatest traitors in mind should be Satan. An angel made in a very high position that betrayed God. Adam, a man that was placed in paradise.

And in his treason he was then forgiven. Judas, a man put beside Christ, made an apostle, prophesied and cast out demons and did many wonders, and betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Traitors are those who use their intimacy and closeness and friendship to jab a dagger in you.

Traitors are those who use friendship to harm you. Headstrong, to be somebody who won't listen to correction, won't hear rebukes, will not turn aside, but veers forward uncorrectable, to be haughty, to mock at authority and to mock at other gifts and to think of oneself too highly, to be arrogant in communication, which is something that often masquerades itself as masculinity, by the way.

Men are drawn to power. They want to see men be competent. They want to see men doing things. They want to see men being decisive. And to be headstrong and haughty is oftentimes something that looks, at least for a short time, like decisiveness and competence.

But the headstrong and the haughty, when they will not repent, they will break. The Lord shatters them. Lovers of pleasure, rather than lovers of God. The love of pleasure. We have the idea of misuse of power with brutality.

We have the love of money. We have the love of pleasure here. And we think that pleasure, short-term pleasures, are those things that are better than God. And what we ought to do, rather than viewing God as inferior to pleasure, which is hedonism, when you make pleasure your God, that's hedonism.

You're making pleasure the good. You organize yourself around reducing your pain and increasing your pleasure. Being lovers of God is to view God as the greatest good and to seek to increase in your possession of Him.

If you put that off and instead say, I want money and I want pleasure and I want power, I want honor, all these things that people chase after instead of God, the curse that we see that befalls the church in the last days of the Old Covenant that brings about horrific apostasy and great persecution is that people's love of God is less than their love of money, their love of pleasure, and their love of power.

And as they love these other things, the church turns into a monstrous place filled with persecution and apostasy. It is difficult to create stable and beautiful and holy places, and it's easy to stir up the flesh of men to destroy these things.

It is easy to see boars run wild in the garden of the Lord. It is easy for vines to be destroyed, and it is hard to grow and cultivate them. But trust takes time to build. It does not take time to destroy.

When you hear all of that, that in the last days, these perilous times that men would do all of these things in the church, you think how, how, Lord, could the church even survive? Signs and wonders that were lying signs and wonders that if it were possible, even the elect would be deceived.

Persecution, apostasy, lying signs and wonders, all of this befalling the church in this early age of the first century. And we're told by God that that would be cut short, because otherwise the church would have been destroyed.

God stopped it, and He preserved His church through this. One of the dangers of these men is that they're not just people out in the world. These are things that you hear all of this, and it kind of sounds like the world, right?

You just go on the Internet, and you can find lots of people that love themselves, that love money, that are boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.

It kind of just sounds like run-of-the-mill world. But when it comes into the church, verse 5, having a form of godliness, but denying its power. Imagine for a minute, people that are zealous about exclusive psalmody, and law gospel distinction, and right government, and the regulative principle, and keeping the Sabbath, and they're very careful to guard all of these forms.

Then they're just wicked as hell. I mean that phrase very intentionally. Just as wicked as people in hell. Doesn't that make your stomach turn? To take all of these signs, making sure all your kids are baptized, and very carefully making sure to show all sorts of outward respect for the Lord's table.

Always heeding the call to worship, always doing your private worship, always doing your family worship, and denying the power of God by living wickedly. Having all these external forms of godliness, loving yourself, and loving money, and boasting, and being proud, and blaspheming, and disobeying parents, and being unthankful, and unholy, and unloving, and unforgiving, and slandering.

Having no self-government, being brutal, and a despiser when other people do anything good at all. To betray at the drop of a hat. To be headstrong and uncorruptible, and to be haughty, and to chase after pleasure-seeking.

That kind of behavior with the external forms.

Is disgusting!

Do you see how that would lead to widespread apostasy? All sorts of people going, I don't know what's true, but if it's that, I don't want any part of it. The ugliness of it. So the church has a duty to recognize these things, and from such people, turn away.

From such people, turn away. For of this sort are those who creep into households, and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Notice, we are so accustomed to not being willing to take those who teach false doctrine, and saying, because they teach false doctrine, we know that they hate God, and we also know that they hate their neighbor.

And we don't want to use that. We go, well, he's wrong about this doctrine, but he's not committing any second table violations of the law. We don't see any clear ways that he's hating his neighbor right now.

Beloved, you can ape the forms of godliness, and use them as a mask to go do all sorts of wickedness, but if you do not have the forms of godliness, we should not pretend that people will have the forms of the love of neighbor.

You have been propagandized to that there are moral atheists, and moral heretics, and you've been taught to not make doctrine the point to not hold men accountable.

For their words.

Beloved, when people have false doctrine, and they have all of the other things that make them lovely, that's very skilled people at creeping into houses. If you are very kind and pleasant, and you hate God, all of those external things are the things that make it so that you are able to creep into houses.

So there is a danger of putting on outward appearances to seem kind, and nice, and helpful, and this coming in. So doctrine matters, the guarding of doctrine matters, and there's a need to guard against that false doctrine, because the false doctrine also brings about hatred.

False doctrine is a hatred of God, and it causes a hatred of neighbor. Remember how we talked about how you can't love yourself, really, if you don't know what's good for you, and you therefore can't love your neighbor if you don't know what's good for you because you can't share it?

That means that all the zeal of a person who knows not God is directed at hating God and hating neighbor, no matter how nice it looks on the outside. Pluralism, this idea that we're going to deal with all sorts of different doctrines, and treat them all like they are true or could be true.

This non-public preference of the truth. These things are things that make it so that we have a place where America has been a growing place, a garden of apostasy and cancerous doctrine. It was a place that was dominated overwhelmingly by Protestants, and now more and more is a place dominated by unbelief and apostasy, and the ineffectiveness at guarding the churches has made it so that overwhelmingly those who are children raised in churches, they're not guarded from the public schools, they're not guarded from the public universities, they're sent off and said go figure it out.

There's this failure to prepare children to be raised and to actually care and be a part of the church. All of that has made it so that our time is a time of great apostasy. The falling away that we see in terms of the percentage of church members that have abandoned the faith in the last generation is the greatest apostasy in the history of the world except for the one in the first century.

From such people turn away, for of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins. Men, it is your job to protect your wives and children from false teachers that would creep into your house.

And often times now they don't come in the physical door, they come in through the iPhone. What podcasts, what research online, what doctrines, what obsessions do your wife and children have? It is your job to protect them.

It is your duty.

When a slithering snake creeps into your house or onto your wife or child's computer or phone, when you see that snake, it's your job to cut off its head. You must guard your own homes and you must do this for yourself.

Any of you.

Who have a household of one, you can hide whatever sins you want for a very long time. But when you play with snakes, you get bit. When you see a snake come in, do not think, because I have no wife or no child, I can take greater risk here.

No, your life matters. And if you're not called to singleness, you need to be pouring yourself into getting ready for marriage and into being a good prospect. And you need to be finding prospects. The serpents that would fill you with poison, you must cut off their heads.

Heretical doctrine, the deceitful lies of pornography, the time-wasting, filling of time with things that could be lawful recreations but just end up chewing up all of the extra time you have to be productive.

A displaced good works.

So that idleness and unholiness.

Grow into greater and greater ungodliness. Women, children, so often when a man does the job of guarding and cuts off the head of a serpent, as opposed to loving and valuing the goodness of their protection.

Instead, discontencing and anger and withdrawal take that place and you become despisers of good when men show themselves to be men. It is the duty of a wife to love and desire and respect the protective work of a husband.

Children, it is your job to respect and love the protective work of your parents and especially your father who is the head of your home. And their desire to guard and protect, encourage it. For of this sort are those who creep into households and make captives of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

These various lusts, the word lust just means desire. So these desires, what do they have? The desire for health, the desire for wealth, the desire for happiness, the desire for honor, for recognition, whatever it is.

Somebody comes in, they creep in and they encourage that lust. And they say, yeah, you deserve this. Your husband neglects you. Your patriarch neglects you. I understand you. And they steal the hearts of women and children and sometimes men like Absalom who came in and stole the hearts of the men of Israel from David.

Women are a particular target, especially gullible or silly or unserious women. To be a serious woman, to be a serious-minded woman is to be a woman who is concerned to be productive and to be a help to her husband.

You know, I've seen some people go, you know, why talk so much about patriarchy and the need for women to follow well and the right ordering of the home? Aren't there other things? Yeah, there are other things, but the Bible talks about that a lot.

And I'll tell you what,.

We live in a culture that hates all of those things and it needs to be repeated over and over again because there has to be a countervailing and a counterfighting and there has to be an encouraging and a reminding and there has to be an arguing against.

People have to see the ugliness of rejecting these things. The Scriptures emphasize it. And it's so important to daily life. The very creation order God made man to do work and He made woman to help him in his work.

Being an effective team as opposed to alienated. And so often you find that if there's a man who's hard working and seeking to get stuff done, sometimes it's hard to get the woman to engage with actually helping the man.

A lot of time women express that their man isn't leading. They want leadership. And when elders come along and encourage the man to lead, all of a sudden the leadership takes the form of the man saying, no, don't do that.

Do this. And oftentimes the prayers for leadership stop getting repeated because there's an unhappiness with the leadership actually occurring. There is a need to work through difficulty. Relationships are hard.

Close relationships are hard. Working together is hard. But the fruit of it is great. Two can do far more than one and one separated. The division of labor allows for much to get done. Relationships are messy, just like having oxen in your barn is messy.

But much grain comes from the strength of an ox, and much utility comes from teamwork. That's true in the household and it's true in the church. And if you can't work together in a household, you're probably not going to work real well together anyplace else.

Women must be serious. They must be serious-minded. They must seek to know God and to seek to help their husbands. And if you're unmarried, seeking to help your father. If you've got a more difficult situation where you don't even have any of that, okay, seek special counsel from officers and an officer's wife.

That's the general time that has to be spent, the general focus that has to be given. And men, do you know what often makes it so that there are gullible women in a house? A man who won't say no and a man who won't wash his wife with the word.

You must be willing to say no and you must be willing to teach, to do the work of teaching. It's your job to wash your wife with the word and the washing with the word powerfully renews her and removes spots and blemishes.