House Rule #11 Keep Your Hope Set On God (1 Timothy 4:6-10) | Adult Sunday School

Good morning, everyone.

Good to see each one this morning. We're glad that you're here. Let's get started in our Bible study this morning. We're going back to 1 Timothy and our study of house rules for God's church. This morning moving into verses 6 through 10 of chapter 4, house rule number 11, keep your hope set on God.

Let's commit our time to our Lord this morning and ask his blessing because we are definitely dependent on him to lead us and guide us, and whether we acknowledge it or not, we are. So let's commit our time to him.

Our Father, we do thank you for this opportunity that we have to be together, to fellowship with one another, to come together in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and because of what he has accomplished for us.

Thank you that we have your word. Thank you that we have your spirit. We pray now that as we look into your word, you would guide us and teach us by your spirit. Help us. Help us to be conformed to the image of Jesus Christ through our study of your word.

Change us to be more like him, and we will praise you in his name.

Amen.

Well, we're back in chapter 4 of 1 Timothy, and there's outlines here. Rick Haslam, if you need one, just raise your hand, I'm sure he'll be happy to pass one.

To you.

This morning we'll be looking at verses 6 through 10, as I said, and keeping our hope set on God after our study last week from verses 1 through 5 on apostasy and the warning against apostasy in the church.

Apostasy and the Need to Guard the Church

Looking at chapter 4, 6 through 10, we saw last time a very sobering warning about that group of dangerous people called apostates, and we spent the last couple Sundays trying to get a working definition, and certainly we did not flip over all the stones because there's lots of things we could have looked at and talked about.

But this morning, we're going to look at something that is related, but it's not related in exactly the same way. It's a different topic, but if we are warned against apostasy in the church, that can be kind of a discouraging study.

That can be something that we look at, and if we see people that are abandoning the faith in Jesus Christ, and as we look at our culture around us, that can be something that might be a little discouraging, might tend to distract us a little bit from what God would have us focus on.

So this morning, we're going to be seeing sort of the flip side of that, keeping our hopes set on God. I just wanted to spend just a little bit more time on this issue of apostasy because it is important, and it is a topic that we see around us, and certainly you do as well, and it's important for us to know why this warning is here.

Some of you may have, and I'm just going to share an example of apostasy. Certainly, you've probably seen it, and you could probably multiply this example with many others. Several years ago, there was a report of a Christian leader named Josh Harris who abandoned.

The faith.

Maybe you remember him. He wrote a book called The I Kiss Dating Goodbye back about 22 years ago. Well, in 2019, in the summer of 2019, he announced that he was abandoning Christianity, and he was also getting a divorce from his wife and leaving his wife and three kids, and he was also promoting the gay, lesbian, transgender lifestyle.

Articles came out in the summer of 2019. One of them, CNN, another one I have here, Newsweek, because the secular press loves these kinds of stories. They love to celebrate the supposed failures of Christianity and the Christian faith.

By the way, I have copies. If you would like copies of these, just see me, we can have them made, but I just want to spend a little time and go over this because it is a really good example of what we see out there, and he's just one.

There's many, many more. This article here, CNN, July 29th, 2019, it says, A former pastor who wrote a bestselling book on traditional relationships has confirmed the end of his marriage, apologized for opposing LGBTQ rights, and announced he is no longer a Christian.

Joshua Harris' book, I Kiss Dating Goodbye, which railed against sex before marriage and homosexuality, sold over one million copies and became a fixture in Christian youth groups after coming out 22 years ago.

But Harris now says the 1997 work contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry, his words, and that he has, quote, undergone a massive shift in regard to my faith in Jesus. Writing on Instagram, he added, quote, By all the measurements that I have for defining a Christian, I am not a Christian.

I have lived in repentance for the past several years. Now remember we talked about this reverse repentance, about going back, Peter talked about returning to where they were, and he used the dog, you know, and the hog.

He says, at this time, I have lived in repentance, now he's repenting from his biblical stand on marriage and that type of thing, I have lived in repentance for the past several years, repenting of my self-righteousness, my fear-based approach to life, the teaching of my books, my views of women in the church, and my approach to parenting, to name a few.

Well, clearly, he's, you know, it's a wholesale abandonment. He says, to the LGBTQ plus community, I want to say that I am sorry for the views that I taught in my books and as a pastor regarding sexuality, I regret standing against marriage equality for not affirming you and your place in the church and for any ways that my writing and speaking contributed to a culture of exclusion and bigotry.

I hope you can forgive me. And so on. The article goes on to talk about him. There's also an article that just came out this last summer, okay? Now this apostasy took place in 2019 in the summer. Sort of like the whack-a-mole game, you know, where the one disappears over here but then he pops up over here, right?

They don't go away, many of them. The dangerous ones don't go away. Just this last summer. He came back in the news.

Why?

Well, he's back recruiting people out of evangelical Christianity. Great article last summer by Carl Truman, some of you know who he is. The site is called First Things. But the article title is, Josh Harris' Message Remains the Same.

It says, Josh Harris is back in the limelight. He made his name as the author of I Kissed Dating Goodbye and thereby a key inspiration for the purity movement in American evangelicalism. Then after a stint as a pastor in an evangelical megachurch in Gaithersburg, he was very quickly elevated to a pastoral position in a very large church for quite a few years.

He left the ministry, repudiated the book and the teaching that had given him his platform and abandoned the faith. Carl Truman says, but this is America. And if you have lemons, you make lemonade. Harris is now back on stage peddling his latest venture, a five-part course helping you to handle the damage that purity culture and religious legalism as promoted by the earlier Harris may have done to your life, okay?

So if you're somebody in evangelicalism and you've been hurt, you've been damaged, you have been damaged by biblical morality, he's there now to help you and he has a big program for that. His program, you can take the class for $275, okay?

He even has one of these other articles, talks about you can take a group course and it's like $1 ,200 to help you, as they call it, deconstruct your faith. That's a term you'll hear, you want to deconstruct your faith.

Well, I'm not going to go through this whole article. You can certainly get a copy, I can make you a copy if you want. Carl Truman ends it by this, this is consistent with the subculture of celebrity evangelicalism that nurtured him, that gave him a platform and that he now claims to have repudiated.

Light on intellectual substance and shamelessly appealing to the emotional intuitions and needs of the customer base. The evangelical celebrity world is geared toward marketing the attractive personality as the branded product that will solve the problems of potential customers.

It is how Josh Harris, the youthful peddler of purity, made his name and his money. And that is precisely how Josh Harris, the older and wiser former Christian, continues to sell himself to anyone foolish enough to buy his, quote, making peace with your story.

Shtick.

Dr. Truman goes on to say, ironically, for all his much trumpeted deconstruction of his own Christianity, Harris seems incapable of escaping the dynamics of the culture that made him famous. He remains the megachurch evangelical celebrity of his earlier self.

He merely does so now in a secular rather than religious therapeutic idiom and without the cadre of evangelical enablers who made him popular. You can take the boy out of the American celebrity evangelicalism, but you cannot take the American celebrity evangelicalism out of the boy.

Messianic self-confidence comes as standard and the preacher is still both the salesman and the product being sold. Pretty good. But that's Carl Truman. He usually can put his finger on an issue and articulate it very, very well.

Well, there is just an example of apostasy. And that's the kind of apostasy that the Apostle Paul is really worried about teaching Timothy and encouraging Timothy to watch out for.

Why?

Because they're in the church, they're part of the church, they depart from the church, and like he told the Ephesian elders back in Acts chapter 20, these then want to draw the disciples after them. They don't just disappear off over the horizon forever.

They depart from the church, then they turn around and then they beckon the church to.

Follow them.

Come on. Oh, come on.

Isn't it just about love? I love you.

Don't you love me?

Come on.

And of course, they're selling something as well. So these are the dangerous ones. The ones that aren't dangerous are the ones you don't know about them, and many of them don't even darken the door of a church ever.

They hear the gospel in some way, shape, or form, but then they depart. But the ones that Paul is concerned about are the ones that the church needs to be protected.

From.

So I thought I'd just share that with you and see if you had any thoughts or any more questions, probably a lot of questions, I keep asking that, about this issue of apostasy before we move on. Any thoughts you might have?

Okay.

Well, the exhortation is beware. They're out there. It's happening. And you're probably going to see more and more of it happen as time goes by. But not to worry. God is in charge. We have a sovereign, powerful God who is in charge of this entire universe as well as the church.

One of the things that I wanted to share too, why this warning from Paul? Why does he give this warning? This is part of what we need to see here this morning. The warning is given by the Apostle Paul so Timothy will be aware of what's going on in the church, right?

So he can guard against it, teach against it, and so on. But remember, even Matthew chapter 7, Sermon on the Mount, the Lord warned about this. He said, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

Oh, and that reminds me, it was brought to my attention that last Sunday I kind of slipped and I made reference to apostates as being sheep in wolf's clothing, okay? You're laughing at me. You're too polite to say anything.

What do you mean?

What do you mean by that? Just, yeah, I wasn't trying to create a different category of apostates or anything like that. It was just me, you know, wixing up my mirds, that's all. But Jesus warned about it.

You will recognize them by their fruits, okay? You will recognize them by their fruits. So every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.

Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire, statement of judgment. It's always going to be there with apostates. Verse 20, thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

By the grace of God, we're being told how to recognize them, right? And even 1 John 2, we looked at that passage last week, 1 John 2, 18 -21. And John says, children, it is the last hour, and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come.

Therefore we know that it is the last hour. We know, okay? And the last hour, of course, is very similar to what Paul says here about in later times from the first advent of Christ to the second advent of Christ.

That's the last times. We're in it now. It's been going on now for over 2 ,000 years. So it's not something that is just in his day. It's a long period of time, and we are in it now. And he says, they went out from us, but they were not of us.

For if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out that it might become plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed with the Holy One. One of the characteristics of the apostates, and Jude says this, is they're devoid of the.

Spirit.

They don't have a spirit. That's why they have no powers of discernment. They're not saved. They're not regenerate. They never were saved in the first place. Very important to understand that as well.

But they went out. Here's the purpose. That it might become plain that they all are not of us. But you have been anointed with the Holy One, and you have all knowledge, or you all have knowledge. I write to you not because you do not know the truth, but because you know it, and because no lie is of the truth.

By the grace of God, we're told in Scripture how to recognize the apostasy. Even later on, the great apostasy is going to happen, and it's also going to include the revealing of the man of sin. It's a revealing.

You're going to know it, right? If you're here, and I don't plan on being here at that point in time. But by the grace of God, we're told these things in Scripture, so we will know. So I just wanted to let you know that's why we're told it in Scripture.

And again, we are only responsible for what we know. God hasn't called us to run around and surface all the apostates. We don't know until they are revealed. Harris is pretty easy, right? He reveals himself.

I'm done with Christianity, right? Now, that's an example of one, but you can clearly see from start to finish, the guy was never a true Christian. But also, and Carl Truman does bring it out in his article, I want to emphasize, we get focused on the individual, right?

But that's not the real story. How in the world did that guy sell a million copies of that book? How in the world did he get elevated up to a pastor of a mega-evangelical church? How did he have all of these thousands of people, millions of people chasing after the guy, even probably to the day that he apostatized, people were going, huh, what?

Oh, I thought he was Pastor Goodman, right? That's the story, folks. It's not the individuals that you can see, it's the thousands and millions that are chasing after him, okay? Alright, anything else that you, any thoughts you might have on that or any questions?

It is a difficult topic, and it's difficult because it's hurtful, and we all certainly have people we think of, maybe even people we love, you know, and we worry about them, we care about them. Well, you can trust God with all things, and our task, as we're going to see this morning, is to keep our hope set on God.

It's easy to get distracted, it's easy to get distracted by these kinds of stories, but it's also very easy to get distracted as we look at the world around us, week by week by week, just in decline. Keep your hope set on God, this is 1 Timothy 4, 6 through 10.

What we're going to see here this morning, and your outline has it there, we need to keep training people, we need to keep training ourselves, Paul tells Timothy, keep training yourself, we need to keep away from myths, we need to keep pursuing godliness, we need to keep our hope set on God.

And really, you can take that Roman numeral 5 and just bring it up to the top, because everything we do here is a product of keeping our hope set on God, and it's also how we keep our hope set on God.

Yeah, Peter.

Well, to me, that would be it. You can't, if you can't get past the gospel, we're done talking, you know. That's his problem. I think somebody asked John MacArthur, what would you do if you met the Pope?

You know, well, I think he said something like, I'd share the gospel with him. Get right down to the basic level apostasy, and maybe walk him through the way of the master, you know. What else do you do?

You know, that's his problem. His problem is he's unregenerate, and if by the grace of God, the Spirit of God used that to bring him to Christ, I'd be rejoicing with him. And then we'd make sure he was in some sort of a Bible teaching church of some kind under the headship of elders for a long period of time.

That kind of thing, you know. But I mean, if a person is unregenerate, there's only one solution, the gospel of Jesus Christ. And it doesn't matter where they are on that spectrum. Now, we also know that somebody like that is spoken of, but we can't know when that line is crossed.

That person that Paul talks about in Romans with the reprobate mind, Paul talked about last time, the heart that is calloused, it can't feel, it's insensitive. But we can't determine that. We know it's there from Scripture, it can be there, but we're not the judge of that.

We can't tell. And so our task is to continuously reach out to that person with the mercy of God. This is Jude. Jude talks about mercying people. He uses, we don't have the, we don't see mercy, we don't have it in a verb form, but in Scripture it's a verb.

Mercy that person, you know. So that's how I would approach it. You just have to share the gospel with him, and if he rejects it again, okay, well then there's not much else to give him.

Yeah, Rick?

Oh, sure. I think there's always profit in using the Word of God, but I wouldn't talk to him about his stewardship and his financial giving or anything. I mean, there's only one thing that can solve his problem, and that's the gospel of Jesus Christ.

When Jesus talked to Nicodemus, Nicodemus was a skilled teacher of the Word of God. The guy was a Pharisee. He would have probably had memorized the entire Old Testament, and Jesus said, you know, cleared all that down and got right down to the guy's problem.

You must be born again. He didn't say you must become born again. Very interesting use of the words there in John's gospel. He uses a steady verb. You must be born again, not become, because then he would have said, okay, how do I become?

And give me something to do, and he would have had something to go out and do. He just said, if to enter the kingdom of God, you must be born again. There is nothing you can do, and the rest of that story is about sovereignty of God and salvation.

They're both there, right? Your responsibility to believe that God is sovereign. They're both right there. So that's how I would approach it. I'm a simple guy. I mean, I think the simple answer is you need the gospel.

You need to be saved. That's his problem. Back in Hebrews 3, right, when the writer of Hebrews is rehearsing the history of Israel, he goes all the way through all that about they're not going to enter the land and all that, and he gets down to it because of unbelief.

That's their problem, unbelief, okay? So anything else?

Yes, sir.

I see.

That's kind of the objective.

Sure.

So do they.

Yeah.

I would say, as long as God gives you the grace to keep doing it, and that's, I mean, as long as that person is drawing a breath, from our perspective, we keep ministering to them the best we can. Jude's little three part at the end of his letters is pretty critical because he talks about three different kinds of people, and it's all about grace, you know?

Give them, be merciful to them, but as far as topics, to me, it's pretty simple. They need Christ. They need repentance. They need the repentant faith in Jesus Christ. That's their problem.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah, but remember, when God saves anybody, he reaches deep into the darkest pit, whether it's a cult, whether it's, and boom, right out of there. And you can find millions of examples of that. Don't get hung up in how deep is the darkness they're in.

It's deep.

But that's not our problem. The gospel penetrates it, so, you know, don't let that discourage you, you know? The Holy Spirit's good. He's a past master at penetrating darkness. Look at Paul, Solitarsis.

You talk about a hard nut to crack. This guy's a murderous, Christ-hating, church-hating guy, one, boom, right off his horse, just.

Like that. There it is, yeah.

That's why we have this passage. Keep your hopes set on God. He's the sovereign God of salvation, right? So, okay, anything else? It is complicated, and it also, you know, it's people you care about, people you love,.

You know?

That can be a complicating thing, but even then, it's still, we have the gospel that has to be preached to them. And sometimes, you know, I think it's, if they're Catholic or whatever, we can maybe learn something about what they're involved in, and that's helpful.

I don't think we need to become an expert in whatever their problem is, but maybe we could learn something more about where they're coming from and have them tell you, how'd you get to be a Catholic? Did you figure that out for yourself?

Were you born into it? You know, and so I don't think we want to talk to them. We want to interact with them a little bit, but also, we have to bring it back to, you know, I have a question I used to ask guys who used to work in construction, and, hey, you guys, you know, I'd say, I remember a Jehovah's Witness one time, the guy was just, he was relentless, you know?

And I had an opportunity to talk with him by ourselves one time, away from other men. And I asked him some questions about his, how long have you been involved with the Witnesses,.

You know?

And boy, he wanted to talk about it, you know? And I said, what do you guys do about this? Do you have, like, worship services, you know? And he wanted to talk all about it, and then finally I said, with the question I was leading up to, what do you guys do with your sin?

And he just stopped, because there's only one answer, and the only answer is found here,.

Right?

Well, I guess maybe, I guess maybe I'd talk to the elders about it. I said, well, what would they do with it? He had no answer. There's no answer other than the gospel. What do you do with your sin?

Sure.

Well, and a lot of times, you've sort of got to bypass that and get down to it, okay? In Roman Catholicism, what do you do with your sin? Tell the priest, he tells, that doesn't, and you can, that should open the door to say, what does that do, you know?

There is no, there is no answer to that other than scripture and the gospel of Jesus Christ. So, but I think it's always important to, you know, interact with people and find out and talk to them a little bit, you know?

But sooner or later, we've got to get down to what counts. That's the difference between liberalism, liberal Christianity, they never get down to the gospel. They have all this other stuff they're talking about, and it's, it's just a great big confusing massive, and usually it involves being nice, being loving, love, we've got to love, and so on.

No, nothing wrong with loving, but love has to be defined by scripture as well, okay? Okay, well, keep your hopes set on God. Let's talk about these verses, four, chapter four, verses six through ten.

Training the Church and the Minister in Sound Doctrine

Timothy starts out hearing this from Paul in this letter, and Paul starts out, and this is, what do we do, how do we relate, how do we, what, Timothy could have been really frustrated by this, wow, depart from the faith, oh my goodness, they're going to devote themselves to deceitful spirits, oh no, what do I do?

Paul tells him what to do, verse six, if you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Jesus Christ, that's verse 6a, keep training the people. Whenever we see things begin to decay out there, whether it's in the culture, or in the country, or in the church, okay, note that down, pray for that, but we keep doing what God has called us to do, do we not?

We keep training the people. This is fundamental to the church. These things, if you put these things before the brothers, this is everything Paul is telling him in this letter, right, and sometimes he uses these things to sort of set off a particular part of his teaching, which he does here, but go back up to verse 14 in chapter three, where we have our theme verse, he says, I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these things to you so that, if I do, you may know how you ought to behave in the household.

Of God.

So these things includes and encompasses everything that Paul is talking about in this letter, but in this particular part of the letter, he's sort of reminding him, you need to put these things before the brothers.

Keep training the people, and keep training them on these things, these things, and if you do that, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus. This is all of the instruction Paul is giving in this letter.

It's comprehensive, confronting false teachers and their false doctrines, waging the good warfare, holding faith in a good conscience, as we saw. Chapter two, praying for and proclaiming the gospel to all kinds of people, and then teaching them about the God-ordained, the God-created place of men and women in the church and in creation, and then teach them, put these things, would include leadership in the church, elders and deacons, and then all of what he will teach in the rest of the letter.

Has to include absolutely every bit of it, and when he says brothers, I don't know what your translations say, but this translation, ESV, always has a little footnote that says brothers. It includes women, it really does, it includes women.

We all know that, but certainly to everyone in the church, and even if your translation says brothers, it also includes the sisters, it's everyone in the church, okay? And very simply, just tell people what God says, just tell people what God says, right?

That's our task. Our task, whether you're a parent, whether you're a Sunday school teacher, whether you're a preacher, a teacher, a leader of any kind, if you're a Christian, your task is very simple.

Just tell people what God says, okay? Just that simple. And it may be done at different levels, right? It may be done, if you're teaching your children, gather around you there in your living room, you're gonna put it at a certain level, but you're still going to tell people what God says, these things.

If you do, you'll be a good servant. This is, again, this is one of 20 times Paul uses this word good in this letter. It's various forms. Good means that which is not just looks good, but is actually intrinsically good.

It's good because God declares it to be good, and it's also good for what it's designed to be accomplishing. So it's good in its appearance, good intrinsically, and it's good for what it's designed to do.

Paul called, remember back in chapter one, he said, we know that the law is good, okay? So keep training the people. Doesn't matter what the culture does, doesn't matter what the church does, doesn't matter about the apostasy all over the place, we need to keep training the people.

One of the things we need to train the people about is beware of apostates, right? And then he says, keep training yourself. The rest of verse six, if you put these things before the brothers, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine that you have followed.

There again, we have that little phrase, the faith. This is what the apostates depart from. They departed back up in verse one. They will depart from the faith. They're apostates because they had some connection to the faith.

You have to have a connection to it. You have to hold to it or believe in it in some way, shape, or form in order to depart from it, right? And so the faith, as we said, this is page six in your notes, that whole list of places where Paul uses it.

It's not my subjective faith. It's more the content of the faith, the objective word of God. And this is what Timothy was trained in, being trained in the words of the faith and of the good doctrine or teaching.

Doctrine there is more in terms of the principles that we draw out of the faith. So you can have both, teaching of the faith, the word of God, and of the doctrines or the truths that we draw out of there.

Being nourished or fed is the meaning of this word, trained. Timothy was trained, he was nourished at the feet of his Christian mother and grandmother. We saw that in 2 Timothy 1. Loas, his grandmother, and Eunice, his mother, trained him as a child.

His father was a pagan unbelieving Gentile. But these two women trained him. And later in 2 Timothy 3, Paul says, remember from whom, plural, you have learned it. And certainly, Paul would have discipled Timothy during the time they had together doing mission.

Work.

But his early training was by his mother and his grandmother as a child. That ought to encourage you moms, and you grandmoms, and you adults who teach little children, okay? Keep at it. Keep training these children because it has benefits for the future.

But Paul wants Timothy to keep training yourself. It's kind of easy, is it not, when you start talking about the false teachers and all of the apostasy going on to get sort of target fixation on them and maybe make that kind of your career, you know?

And it's easy then to forget about, well, what about my own spiritual growth? I need to be careful that I don't get involved. I need to be careful that I don't slip off, slide off into that. I need to continually keep myself in subjection and in fellowship in a Bible teaching ministry.

Why?

Because iron sharpens iron. And we're in that environment that is a continuous teaching and preaching of the Word of God. It helps me keep training myself in the words of the faith. That's the topic. That's what we preach and teach.

The words of the faith and of good doctrine that you have followed. And so Timothy, or anyone's, effectiveness for God is based on how they are nourished and so keep feeding yourself so that you can feed others.

And Timothy was nourished on the faith, the Word of God. Again, it's the objective content of the gospel, the scriptures, the truth about Jesus Christ. It's that which the apostates departed from and do depart from back in verse one of this passage.

It's the truth about Jesus Christ. Sound doctrine, good teaching. And you have followed it. It's how we are effectively then used by God. So keep training the people. Keep training yourself. And here's the negative one in the list.

Rejecting Myths and Pursuing Godliness

Keep away from myths. This is verse seven, the first part of verse seven. Have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths. Nothing to do with it. It's a very strong word. It means reject it. Don't even go anywhere near it.

Stay away from it. And in Timothy's day, as we saw, there was all kinds of false teaching floating around. I mean, it's obviously worse now. And there's more access to it and it has more access to you, right?

It's irreverent, which means it's profane. It's not from God. Very interesting word. It's a word that's used to speak of a doorway threshold. You say, well, what does that have to do with being irreverent or profane?

Well, because it's a Jewish idiom and they would talk about something being profane. The threshold of the doorway is only good for being walked on or walked over. It's that base, that low, that it's something that is walked on.

These things that people get hung up on, they're irreverent and they're also, they're silly. They're silly myths, have nothing to do with irreverent, silly myths, because they're not going to help you.

It's spiritual junk food, or at worst, it's spiritual roadkill. And a lot of it is sort of spiritual toxic waste, you know, and it's not good for you. Second Timothy 4 .2, where Paul is exhorting Timothy about preaching the word, he says, these people who abandon the word of God, if they abandon the word of God, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own lusts and will wander off into myths.