Silencing Liars - [Titus 1:6-12]

Recently, I was told the story of a three -year -old who was driving with her mom in a car.

I know this is going to sound far -fetched, a three -year -old with her mom in a car. They're driving home from a relative's house when the mother hears scratching on the back of her seat.

She finally says to the little girl, she goes, What are you doing? The little girl says,

I'm spreading blood. Because I don't want

God to kill her little stuffed animal. I heard that story and I just thought, that's a great story.

Now, there was no actual blood. No animals or stuffed animals were actually hurt during the production of the story.

But the point is, what story do you suppose the little girl had recently heard?

Passover. She hears the story, she understands what? That the firstborn are going to be killed unless lamb's blood is spread over the door.

And so she sees the seat and she's going, I'm going to spread the lamb's blood over this seat so that my little stuffed animal doesn't get killed.

What's the point? The point is this. She hears the story of the Passover and she says,

God's going to do something. If I don't do something, I need to do something.

She hears the word of God and what does she do? She acts on it. How is it possible that a three -year -old can hear that and know that she needs to act?

And yet the church today hears the word of God and thinks, for the most part, that they don't need to act on it.

And specifically what I'm getting at tonight is discernment. If we look at overall the panorama of the church, the level of discernment is, in my view, pretty pathetic.

Let me cite some evidence, a little survey from September of 2013.

Now this is about millennials, so you have to know it's a Barna survey. When asked what has helped their faith grow, these are young people, church does not even make the top ten factors.

Instead, the most common drivers of spiritual growth, identified by millennials themselves, are prayer, family, friends, the

Bible, having children, that'll make your faith grow, I'll tell you that, and their relationship with Jesus, but not church.

Well, why do you suppose that is? Why do you suppose that young people are saying, you know, church doesn't really help me grow very much?

What's that? Well, that'd be one reason, but they don't go because it's a waste of time, they think.

I'm going to suggest to you tonight, because if we look broadly at the evangelical church, we would see that church is not a place where you go to learn the

Bible. It's not a place where you are taught the Bible and taught doctrine. It's a place where you have your needs met, where you are welcomed, where everybody's welcome, where we're concerned about diversity.

I go to a lot of church websites, but I went to one the other day that said how they prized their diversity.

There seems to be, in broader evangelicalism, this idea that doctrine really isn't that important.

In fact, somebody wrote here recently, you don't need doctrine, you need

Jesus. I want to say, well, how do you exactly explain who

Jesus is without doctrine? How do you do that? That would be a pretty neat trick. How about this for a little bumper sticker?

Doctrine divides, but love unites. Or this little slogan that people often say, we want to be known for what we're for, not what we're against.

I think that pretty much describes evangelicalism writ large. The church has become more and more immaterial.

Why? Because it stands for very little. Millennials, young adults, see church as unimportant because they go, and it's just a place where people go to feel good about themselves.

I mean, it's like the old Friends TV show. Everybody knows your name, and you're just kind of welcome, and everybody kind of comes in, and that's all there is.

Well, the world provides outlets for that. I mean, they could stay at home, right? Get online with their friends and play games.

They could go on Facebook or Twitter. Who needs to go to church? In previous generations, the church, again, speaking largely, views itself as in competition with worldly activities.

So in previous years, they've tried to strategize on how to stop men from just staying home and watching

NFL games. I know what we'll do. We'll have Saturday night services. Or how are we going to stop people from just going to 12 -step groups?

Well, what if we have our own? But now they're trying to figure out how to compete with things that there's no way they can compete with.

What are they going to do, online church? Oh, wait. That probably is coming, isn't it? What does

Scripture call us to? What does Scripture say the church should be about? Scripture continuously calls the people of God to be discerning, to value doctrine, to value teaching, to draw a line in the sand, as it were, between false teaching and biblical teaching, between truth and error.

My question this evening is, will we obey that call? I'd like you to turn your Bibles to the book of Titus, Titus chapter 1.

And I'm going to read verses 5 to 16, mostly to just give us a little bit of extra context.

Titus chapter 1. This is why

I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained in order and appoint elders in every town as I directed you.

If anyone is above reproach, the husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to the charge of debauchery or insubordination.

For an overseer, as God's steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick -tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self -controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.

He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.

For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party.

They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.

One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.

This testimony is true. Therefore, rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth.

To the pure all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving nothing is pure, but both their minds and their consciences are defiled.

They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. They are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any good work.

Now this evening, I want you to see three marching orders taken from our text, three marching orders that Paul gave to Titus, so that you will see the necessity of supporting and encouraging a local church and having theologically precise men willing to give their all for the truth.

Three directives for the church's health, culminating in a command to silence or to muzzle those who distort the word of God.

The first directive is to put the church in order, put the church in order.

Look at verse 5. This is why I left you in Crete, so that you might put what remained in order.

Paul wrote to Titus in this pastoral epistle, known as a pastoral epistle, because it was written by Paul to a pastor, telling him specifically what he needed to do, and he wrote to him, charging him to straighten out the churches at Crete.

The apostle stresses the need to maintain sound doctrine.

Now Crete, for those of you who don't know, is an elongated, kind of stretched out, thin island, and it's south of the

Aegean Sea and basically southeast, let me see if I want to say it that way, southeast of Greece, I think that's about right.

Anyway, south, it's in the Mediterranean. Even as early as the writing of the

Iliad, like 1 ,200 years before this, Crete was known as an island with many cities, so think about this, if he says,

I left you in Crete in order that you could put, to put all these churches together, there were churches virtually in every city, so that was a lot of work.

This was no small task he was assigning to Titus. Now we don't read much about Crete in Scripture, in fact, you know, you can just use your computer and type it in there, there really isn't very much about it.

In Acts it's mentioned a couple times, basically on a journey that Paul was on, his last journey on a ship, but there really isn't much given to us, we have no indication in Scripture exactly what

Paul and Titus were doing there. But it really wouldn't be much of a stretch to think that given what he left

Titus to do, they were there for something, some church purpose, some evangelical purpose, some missionary purpose, they could have been going to the different churches and trying to strengthen them by preaching in their pulpits, but we don't really know.

What we do know is Paul left Titus in Crete, and he gave him a specific charge, and he gave him this letter to give him some apostolic authority, and to kind of give him a little push along the way in exactly what he needed to do.

Now Paul had spent some time with Titus before their time in Crete, and Titus had proven his worth, he had proven his mettle.

Paul had complete trust in Titus. In fact, in the book of 2

Corinthians, he went on at some length praising Titus for his work with them.

So how was Titus to put the churches in order on Crete?

Well, that brings us to our second marching order. He was to first identify the church leaders.

And he was to do so by their spiritual qualifications. It's interesting because people have a variety of ways that they want to choose elders.

Sometimes it's by their professional career, their success in life, how much money they have.

But these are all spiritual qualifications. These are marks of spiritual maturity. Look at verse 5, and he says,

And appoint elders in every town as I directed you. So how do you get churches organized?

How was Titus to organize what remained? By appointing leaders, elders who are capable of organizing them.

And it's no different today. Churches without biblically qualified and biblically driven leaders struggle.

They flounder. And again, notice that Paul doesn't say you should nominate them, put them up to a congregational vote, rotate every three or five years.

He says appoint. It means to put someone in charge. Churches were never meant to be egalitarian in the sense that everyone's opinions and preferences should be balanced.

In other words, church is not a democracy. What happens if you have a democracy?

You wind up with some of the least mature people having equal say with the most mature people.

But the church must be put in order by the elders. Let's examine these requirements first, and I'm going to go through these pretty fast.

First, he must have a good reputation. Look at verses 6, the beginning, and verse 7, the beginning.

If anyone is above reproach, and again in verse 7, Again, for an overseer as God's steward must be above reproach.

We get the idea that he must be above reproach. Well, what does that mean? Does he have to be perfect?

Does he have to be sinless? If so, there would be no elders anywhere. We know that. But he has to have a good reputation both in and outside of the church.

Charges might be made against him, but they ultimately will not stick. So he must be above reproach.

He must have a good reputation. He must, secondly, run a good home. Look again at verse 6. The husband of one wife and his children are believers and not open to charges of debauchery or insubordination.

Briefly, an elder must be known as a dedicated husband, a one -woman man, somebody who is not flirtatious.

He must have his children under control. They can't be the town hooligans or the kids that everyone at church tries to avoid.

I'm not going to watch those kids. Why is having control over your home so important?

Why do you suppose that is? As a spiritual qualification. I'm going to give you two reasons.

First of all, I think it shows what your priorities are. If your home is a wreck, it's probably because you're not spending much time and energy on them.

But I think the second reason is, given to us in 1 Timothy chapter 3, that if you don't know how to run your own household, what?

How are you going to run the household of God, the church? You can't do it.

If you can't be faithful in things that are close to you, that should be easy to run, then why should you be put in charge of something as large as a church?

An elder also must have self -control. Look at the end of verse 7. He must not be arrogant or quick -tempered or a drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable.

An elder has to be a model for others to follow. Rather than putting his own interests first, he must look out for the good of others, a

Philippians 2 kind of attitude. He cannot be someone who is controlled by alcohol, his emotions, or greed.

An elder must be someone who readily opens his home. After all, he knows that everything he has is what?

A gift from God to be used for the furtherance of the ministry of the gospel. An elder also must pursue

Christ -likeness. Look again at verse 8. He must be a lover of good, self -controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

Again, these are not exceptional requirements. Every believer should be striving after these things, but they are the marks of the work of the

Holy Spirit in his life. An elder's desires, his lifestyle, is reflective of Scripture.

He loves what the Lord loves. His life is not marked by excess in possessions and activities, in anything that might prove a hindrance to him or to the church.

In short, elders should be someone that a younger man can emulate as he emulates

Christ. The final qualification for an elder given here is he must be a good teacher, an apt teacher, of good doctrine.

Look at verse 9. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine.

Okay, now that we've pretty much concluded the introduction, we'll get into the message proper. That's what you say when you've gone way too long in your introduction.

But look, Paul, in writing to Titus, he wants to make sure that leaders of the local churches, the elders, hold to what they are taught, what they were taught.

Well, what would that be? They would, at this point, have what? They wouldn't have Revelation and a bunch of the

New Testament books, probably not many of them at all. So we're really talking about the Old Testament, and we're talking about apostolic teaching.

And he's saying, listen, you need to hold on to the apostolic teaching. The way that we've taught you is the way that things need to continue to be taught.

Elders are to be keepers of the truth. A very similar concept is presented in 2

Timothy 2, chapter 2, verse 2. And what you have heard from me, from Paul, in the presence of many witnesses, entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also.

That's the point. Paul hands the baton to Titus.

Titus will hand the baton to these men, and these men need to hand the baton to someone else. Nothing changes.

Titus was to find men who would not go wobbly on the Word of God, but stand fast, faithfully repeating what they had been taught.

And may I just say, no teacher of the Bible should ever seek to be innovative when it comes to doctrine.

If you've got a new doctrine, bury it. Take it out in the backyard and bury it somewhere.

We don't change what has been given to us. We don't accommodate to culture.

We don't accommodate to science. We don't make changes based on the latest archaeological finds.

Why? Because all these things are going to come up, and they're going to go away.

The Word of God stands unchallenged. There is no new story.

It's the old, old story. Now these men must also teach sound doctrine.

That's the purpose for which elders are to be men who can hold fast to what they are taught.

Look, so that, that's the purpose clause, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine.

You hold on to what you were taught. Why? So that you can teach sound doctrine.

And that word sound is actually the word for healthy. It's healthy doctrine.

It's not junk food. It's not poison. I mean, think about it. That would imply that the opposite is unhealthy doctrine.

Bad teaching. So again, going back to that statement I said in the beginning about you don't need doctrine, just Jesus, or doctrine divides, or doctrine isn't practical.

If sound doctrine isn't necessary, if there's some kind of simple credo like, just give me

Jesus, that will suffice, I would just challenge anybody to say, okay, if that's what you believe,

I don't need doctrine, I just need Jesus, then explain to me why we have so much revelation.

Why do we have so much? Why don't we just have a one -word Bible that just says Jesus? That's all

I need. Doctrine is practical.

What is doctrine? What is theology? Study of God, what is doctrine?

It's just systemizing that. But it's really just kind of a,

I don't need doctrine, just give me Jesus. It's just anti -intellectualism. It sounds really pious.

It sounds really holy. But what would it say about God?

Again, it just says that maybe he wasted his time with all this. Or maybe he isn't that complex.

Maybe there isn't that much to know about God. It's very spiritual sounding, but at the end of the day, what is it?

It's sophistry, it's foolishness. We will never stop learning about God, so just close, kind of close our, put our hands over our ears, like Pastor Mike was saying this morning, and just go, la, la, la, la, la.

I'm not going to listen to doctrine. I don't need doctrine. Why don't you just say,

I don't want to learn anything about God. He's not that complicated. You know, I guess heaven will probably be boring, because there's nothing new to learn about God.

Or on the other hand, will we be constantly learning about God? Will we constantly stand in awe of him?

Are the riches of scripture so deep that we'll never completely learn them?

I think that's true. Now let me just back up a little bit.

What is the purpose of life for a Christian? Now we could say something like, to live to the glory of God, and I would say, that's right, amen, preach it.

But if I could boil it down to two things, here's what I would say. Number one, being conformed into the image of Christ.

Right, that's what we want. As Christians, we pray that daily we will see ourselves becoming more and more

Christ -like. It won't be perfect, and sometimes there are going to be little downward slopes, like the stock market.

But Lord willing, we're going to hit that upward slope too. By the grace of God, by his spirit, we're going to be conformed to the image of Christ.

That's number one. Number two, we make disciples. That's the great commission.

We make disciples. Now how do we do this? How are we conformed to the image of Christ?

By knowing more about him. By knowing more of his word. By knowing more sound doctrine.

By hearing more sound teaching. Then how do we make disciples?

By teaching them sound doctrine. By giving them sound teaching.

This is what we do. This is the Christian life. And to say, I don't need doctrine is to say,

I don't need to grow and I don't want anybody else to grow. Again, it sounds really kind of holy.

But at the end of the day, it's vapid. It's inane. It's foolishness. The first marching order was to put the church in order.

Secondly, to identify the church leaders. And third, to silence the false teachers. He starts there, right in verse 9, with rebuking the false teachers.

And also to rebuke those who contradict it. Contradict what? Sound doctrine.

What they've already learned. Elders have to instruct in sound doctrine.

That's the positive side. But they are also required, it's not optional, to rebuke.

Which means to convict, to reprove teachers who speak against sound doctrine.

Now here's a question for you. How can you correct those who teach error, who teach unsound doctrine, who teach unhealthy doctrine, if you don't know sound doctrine?

And the answer is, you can't. It's kind of like, you know, sending an officer out into the field and telling him to go stop the bad guys, and not giving him a uniform, a gun, a badge, or a patrol car.

Go ahead and stop crime. Or as we used to say, crush crime. You can't do it without the proper equipment and training.

You cannot do it. It cannot be done. And if I may say, if we can take this just kind of a step further, this really, this job, this calling, being an elder, is really at the heart of spiritual warfare.

What do I mean? What do we think of, you know, typically, especially those of you who spent too much time in Christian bookstores when you were a young Christian like I did.

You know, you read some of these spiritual warfare books, and what are they? It's angels versus demons.

Who's going to win? I don't know, but I sure hope the angels win. I guess, you know, that's kind of how they're portrayed.

But the truth is, spiritual warfare is a battle of ideas. It's a battle of sound doctrine versus false doctrine.

It's bad theology, false Christ, different gospels, or as Paul would describe them elsewhere in 2

Corinthians, they are fortresses. Fortresses. Fortresses. That's the kind of warfare that we're waging.

It's a battle of ideas, and these fortresses, these false ideologies are constantly being repackaged and brought to the church as if they are something new.

So who defends the church, humanly speaking? We know that the Lord ultimately is building

His church, but who does He use? Humanly speaking, it must be those who are the most theologically informed, the most mature in the faith, the men who have trained themselves for the men who are ready to enter the fray, enter the ring.

Spiritual warfare is, again, not demons versus angels. It is the truth that saves the souls of men versus error that can only damn them.

That's what spiritual warfare is. An elder does not amass doctrinal knowledge so that he can be the smartest guy around, the coolest kid on the block.

Can he be cool? I don't know. But there's a purpose given in verse 9.

A so that. Those are important two words to always look for, the so that, the hinnah in the

Greek. It tells us why, so that he can both teach sound doctrine and he can correct those who teach false doctrine.

You also want to stop false teachers from deceiving. Look at verse 10. For there are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party, given over to Jewish tradition.

It says, listen, they must be silenced since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach.

False teaching was a big problem in Crete. How do I know that? Because I look at verse 10 and it says, there are many.

There were a lot of false teachers. False teachers everywhere, on every corner.

What Titus was going to need was a lot of, if you could put it this way, theological deputies, theological police officers, because there were a lot of theological criminals going on.

There was a lot of theological crime, theological burglary. I don't know what crime to call it, but you know.

Insubordinate means that they were in rebellion against God. These false teachers were in rebellion against God.

Now, of course, they did not advertise themselves as being in rebellion.

They didn't run around in orange jumpsuits. They didn't have a Hamburglar mask on.

They didn't advertise themselves as being fakes.

They tried to act like they were novel, that they were correcting what was wrong.

The verse there says that they're empty talkers, that they spoke a lot, but they said very little. I'd like to say this.

They must have sounded like the Joel Osteen of back then.

Same kind of thing. They talked a lot, but it was a lot of, well, I don't know, and that kind of thing. But they were deceivers, leading people away from the truth.

And they made a lot of money. And Paul says that it was shameful because they taught false doctrine.

And notice again, he says, they must be silenced. What does that mean? It means they're not to be negotiated with.

They're not to be compromised with. They're not to be permitted to teach. They're not going to be given any kind of rope whatsoever to see if maybe they'll slip up and make a mistake so that we can then correct them.

They are to be silenced. And it says, that word silenced means strictly to apply a muzzle or a bridle.

It's like, what do you do with your dog if you don't want your dog to bark? We tried a bunch of things on our dogs. Nothing ever seemed to work, including electric shock collars.

But here he says, listen, you just fit them with a muzzle. Stop them from speaking. Don't let them say anything.

Why? They're to be prevented from teaching. Their mouth is to be stopped. That's literally what it means.

One man writes, this zero -tolerance policy is called for because these teachers are ruining whole households, plunging their followers into spiritual turmoil by overturning their previous convictions through persuasive arguments.

They were leading people astray, causing all kinds of chaos. Now fast forward to today.

What happens when one dares to examine the teaching of false teachers? If you're fortunate, and I'll put that in quotation marks because we know there's no such thing as fortune or luck, but if you're fortunate, you are termed what?

A fundamentalist? Or a hater? Can I tell you a secret?

I'm not ashamed to wear the title fundamentalist. The original fundamentalists were men like Machen, who published a series of articles about the essentials, the fundamentals of the

Christian faith. The first five that they all agreed on. Listen to this.

The virgin birth of Christ. In other words, if you don't believe in the virgin birth of Christ, that He was literally born of a virgin, then you're not a

Christian. That's a fundamental of the faith. You have to believe that. And what is that anyway? Doctrine.

Sound teaching. That's something the apostles would have taught and that we need to continue to teach.

Why would that be so shocking in the 1900s? Why would that be something that you would have to draw a line of sand about?

Because the liberals said, wait a minute. It's impossible for someone to be born of a virgin.

That can't be true. And sadly, a lot of people who wear the label

Christian today don't believe in the virgin birth of Christ. Second fundamental.

Inerrancy of Scripture. Inerrancy of Scripture. If you believe that Scripture is

God -breathed, as it claims, then how could there be a mistake in it? Talking about in the original manuscripts, no mistakes, not one.

And again, the liberals say, well, that's not possible. The cultists say that's not possible.

Third fundamental. The miracles of Christ, that He actually did what the Bible says He did.

If the Bible says He walked on water, He walked on water. And the liberals said, well, wait a minute. That's not possible. Fourth fundamental.

That the death of Christ made an actual atonement for sins. It wasn't that He set a good example or anything of that sort.

It's that He actually appeased the wrath of God for our sins.

Fifth fundamental. That Jesus Christ was actually raised from the grave bodily.

Not spiritually. Not in any other kind of way, but that He actually rose from the grave.

If you don't believe these five things, you cannot be a Christian. I don't even know what the shock is.

I'm a fundamentalist. I'll sign right up. For the truth, for sound doctrine, and to halt the advance of false doctrine,

I'll gladly be called a fundamentalist. You can call me whatever you want as long as that's what it means.

You ought to feel that exact same way. He also writes about,

Paul does, about convicting false teachers. And really this is important because it's not enough to just defeat their ideas.

What's the goal here? Look at verse 12. One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said,

Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true.

He's just confirming that. He says, they are these things. Therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound to the faith.

Now I could go on about this whole Cretan thing, but let me just kind of summarize it here. Here he quotes,

Paul's quoting a poet, one of their own, and affirms that the saying is truthful that the people of Crete were known as warriors.

And they believe that the ends justified the means. They were kind of Machiavelli before Machiavelli came along.

One historian, Polybius, said this, said so much, in fact, do sordid love of gain and lust for wealth prevail among them, among the

Cretans, that the Cretans are the only people in the world in whose eyes no gain is disgraceful.

No gain is disgraceful. Whatever it took, if they could do it and get something out of it, they were willing to do it.

That's the reputation of the Cretans. But I want to draw your attention to what Paul writes at the end of verse 13.

The goal is always redemption. What does he say at the end of verse 13?

He says, Therefore rebuke them sharply, listen, that they may be sound in the faith.

He wants a transformation to happen to them. He wants them to come to saving faith.

Yes, you are to silence them. Yes, you are to stop them from teaching their falsehoods, to stop the liars from lying long enough to get them to listen to the truth.

But you want to present the truth to them. You know, I know of nobody that I think does a better job in that than James White.

If you've seen him debate, when he was debating Dominic Crossan, who is a member of the

Jesus Seminar, these people who say, they're modern liberals, who say that Jesus didn't say the things that the

Bible says he said. They decide that. And even as he was debating Crossan, what did he do again and again?

He was preaching the gospel to them. He was trying to convince them of the truth so that Dominic Crossan would believe, and that should be our goal too.

Now, I want to ask you this. Do you think that we have our own kind of creed today? I do.

Again, I want you to consider Christendom broadly, the Christian world broadly. What's the number one

Christian sect? Number one, most members in the world that would call themselves

Christians. Roman Catholicism. And what does

Roman Catholicism teach? Salvation by faith that you generate and your own works.

And if that's not enough, then you have to borrow from the Bank of Merit, the Treasury of Merit.

You have to get a little loanage. That's not sound doctrine.

It's damning heresy. Think of the more popular writers and speakers of our day.

Rick Warren. I saw him on a show where he said, you know, kind of offhandedly that his book was the best -selling non -fiction book, you know, other than the

Bible, which is true. And yet, if you do any kind of research on the purpose -driven life, what do you find out?

The people of many faiths read that book, and they are not offended. What does that say about a

Christian book that doesn't offend non -Christians? It says to me that it doesn't have much 1

Corinthians 1 .18 message in it. It doesn't have much of the cross in it, or they would be offended.

The cross is an offense. Other popular writers.

T .D. Jakes. Very popular. His only problem is he denies the

Trinity. Well, that's not his only problem, but it's a problem. It's a pretty big one. Here's one that's a little closer to home.

Tim Keller, who claims orthodoxy, but allows that people are in hell because they choose to be there, not because God sends them there.

It's pretty hard to get there if you read the Bible. He's also open to evolution as a process

God may have used to create life on earth.

Let me just quote him here. My conclusion is that Christians who are seeking to correlate

Scripture and science must be a bigger tent. That's kind of a political phrase.

They're a big tent. A bigger tent than either the anti -scientific religionists or the anti -religious scientists.

Let me ask you something. Who are the anti -scientific religionists? The fundamentalists.

The Christians. The people seated in this room. We have to have a bigger tent, he says.

Even though in this paper, this paper that he wrote, I argue for the importance of belief in a literal

Adam and Eve, I've shown here that there are several ways to hold that and still believe in God using evolutionary biological processes.

So don't take Genesis 1 and 2 too literally because you don't want to narrow the tent.

You don't want to exclude people. I could go on about Keller, but let me just throw out a few more names here.

Joyce Meyer, I saw something the other day, posted on Facebook, you know, and I jumped on that bandwagon because she's very popular, but she is a heretic.

She actually said that there was a time where Jesus stopped being God and he couldn't help himself.

He was no longer capable of helping himself. False. False. When you go into a

Christian bookstore, there should be one of two signs over the door. It should either say you are about to enter a mission field or you're about to enter a mine field, one of the two because both are true.

You can't go and just pick a book off the shelf and think, oh, this is going to be good. This is going to be helpful.

This is going to be filled with sound doctrine because most likely you're going to pull that book off the shelf and it's going to be theological strychnine.

How much strychnine do you want? How much strychnine do you want in your diet? I don't know. I want less. We could go on and talk about Francis Chan, Benny Hinn, TBN.

And there are trends today. I'm just describing the overall evangelical world. Trends like prayer circles, which is really nothing more than Eastern mystical thoughts.

Music like the Jesus culture, which if you listen to that, it's terrible. These are nothing more than satanic assaults on the truth and they are as relentless as the ocean pounding on the beach.

And with every wave, with every new wave, some of the weaker brothers and sisters are washed out to sea.

What are you willing to do about it? And I'm going to tell you, as people are dragged out into the ocean, as they're dragged out into this theological riptide, just saying, you know what?

Don't worry about doctrine. Just have Jesus. Jesus isn't going to help them. It's not going to help them.

Now, are some false teachers and some false systems worse than others? Yes. Some are probably brothers in Christ, sisters in Christ.

But when they seek to package the old, old story and to make it relevant, what's going to happen? What do you suppose the next generation who follows after them, what's going to happen to the next generation after Tim Keller and Rick Warren?

Are they going to get closer to the truth or further away from it? Well, if history is a guide, the tendency is towards theological drift.

And so even if they are Orthodox, which is debatable now, in subsequent generations, they're not going to be.

They will become more, their followers will be more and more liberal. They won't be handing off the apostolic teaching because they didn't give it in the first place.

They gave a portion of it. If history tells us anything, it is that relevance, that is trying to be relevant, is the first step to liberalism and unbelief.

Now, let me give you just some takeaways here. First takeaway, men must be the primary theologians of their home.

I'm going to say that again because I expect to get pelted. Men must be the primary theologians of their home.

Why? Well, two reasons. First of all, only men can be elders. And even the desire to be an elder, even if you never get to be an elder, is a good thing.

It says so in 1 Timothy. That's how I know it's true. But one cannot be an elder without learning sound, healthy doctrine.

All men should be eager students of theology and, listen, disciplers.

Disciplers. If you're married, you should be discipling your wife. If you have kids, you should be discipling your children.

You cannot be an elder without running your household well, and you cannot think of yourself as doing well or doing right or honoring the

Lord if you are not doing these things. If you're not an active student trying to learn more about sound doctrine.

Second reason. The husband is ultimately responsible for his wife and kids. He's the one who's going to have to give an account.

Even as I was listening this morning to Adam just standing there as Eve was being led astray,

I just thought, how often does that happen in households today? The husband's too busy with something else.

Some sitcom. Some really important newspaper article. He's too busy to fulfill his

God -given obligation. Adam failed to protect

Eve and many, many men failed to protect their wives and their children.

Second takeaway as Christians. We ought not to sit down to an exchange of ideas with heretics.

We tell them the truth. I remember when Pastor Mike used to talk about this. I remember him recounting how he chased

Jehovah Witnesses all over his North Hollywood neighborhood. Telling them not to teach any of his neighbors or anything.

Listen, we don't sit down and smoke the peace pipe and talk with Satan about, hey, what do you think?

What's your opinion, Satan, about God? What did you tell me? We don't sit and talk with Mormons as if they have just as valid a theological premise as we do.

We have the truth. We declare that truth to them. Again, what did he say in this passage? We silence them.

We muzzle them. Now does that mean we physically go up and muzzle them? No. We have to be so equipped with the truth when they raise these false ideas, what do we do?

We refute their false ideology with the truth. We give them Scripture.

We answer their falsehoods with Scripture. Entertaining them, sitting down and exchanging thoughts with them is failing to silence them.

Third takeaway. With so many false teachers and false religions masquerading as Christian, everybody wants to be a

Christian, and so many mediums, I mean, when we think about all the ways false information gets disseminated now, it's not just door to door.

They've got the Internet, cable TV, satellite TV, everything else.

There's never been a time when the church has been in greater need of men who long to defend her.

We need elders. I don't just mean BBC, I mean the church generally. We need men who are willing to take the slings and arrows of political correctness, of tolerance, and who are willing to stand firm against the onslaught of error.

The Word of God is clear. False teachers are not to be ignored. They are not to be tolerated.

They are to be silenced. They are to be muzzled. They are to be shut down.

How is it that so much of the church today is indifferent to this? The Holy Spirit leaves no doubt what must be done.

And if a three -year -old can understand the need for action after hearing a

Bible story, why can't grown -ups grasp that action against false teachers is mandatory?

It's not an option. It's a command from your Lord. Let's pray. Father, we thank you for this sure word, for Paul's instruction to Titus about the need, the need for men to stand up and to be humble enough to stand up for you, to not be afraid of what's going to happen to them, to not be concerned about their image, their popularity, their political standing, any of those things.

But, Father, to be faithful to what you have called us to. Lord, I would pray for each one here tonight that we would be mindful that discernment is not a bad word.

Truth and error are all around us. Lord, you call us to be in battle for the truth, to be valiant for the truth.

And, Lord, over the centuries, you've even called men to die for the truth.

Let us not shrink from the fight. Lord, I would pray for our church, for churches in New England, churches all around the world,

Lord, that you would give more men a desire to be elders. That you would give your people, generally, a hunger for more truth about you, for more theology, for more doctrine, for more sound doctrine, for more good food.

That they would long for the pure milk of the Word, for the truth about you. That we might grow into maturity.

That we, as a church, might grow to be one. And that we might not be tossed hither and thither by every wind of doctrine.

Lord, bless each one here tonight, each one who hears this message, that we might be encouraged to stand for you, to stand for truth.