False Teaching - 1 Timothy - Gospel Church

Mercy Heal at all of our campuses. Man, it is so good to be back. All right, we're excited. Our family's been gone this summer. Some of you are like, man, I appreciate it.

I appreciate it. I say it's glad to be back. Some of you are like, man, we had no idea you were gone. Okay, so I've been gone.

But hey, we are so glad to be back. If you got a copy of Scripture, take it out and turn with me to the book of 1 Timothy. And we are going to be chasing some things over the next couple of months. Today, what I want to get across first is just sort of where we're going with this series quickly, and then we'll get into the story.

Here's where we're going with the series. Healthy churches come from their Heavenly Father. All right?

Healthy churches are a gift from God, and He is integrally connected to them in the same way that an artist is connected to a piece of art. When you see the art, it is connected deeply to the artist. Or when you see a great meal or you experience something that's really good from eating a dessert or something like that, it is very connected to the cook, right? You end up seeing something about the cook because of what you have eaten. Now, I'm going to do something.

I'm going to take a risk here and see if anybody's willing to admit this of themselves at our campuses as well. But I'm going to ask you a question. I want to know, by raise of hand, who in here loves, and I don't mean like, I mean you love, and you would say it is my favorite dessert, you love pudding.

Would anybody say yes? Okay. All right. We have about five here at Regional, okay?

I don't know how many of you guys got at the campuses, all right? I love it. There's some great honest people here, a little weird. Okay, pudding, your favorite dessert. No, I'm kidding. Hey, but why do I bring that up?

Here's why. What's the phrase I'm about to go to next? You've all heard it, right? The proof is in what?

That's right. The proof is in the pudding. Now, what does that mean when somebody says the proof is in the pudding? What they mean is if you want to know about the authenticity of not just the pudding, but the cook, if you want to know if what they did is right, you can't just look at it from the outside, right?

If you want to know if it's the real thing, you've got to taste and see. You've got to actually dive in and have some sort of interaction with it, and if it's the right thing, it reflects on whoever it is that made it, and that is exactly, I think, what the book of 1 Timothy is maybe trying to get us to see, that a deep interaction, not just from the outside looking in, but a deep interaction with a church will reveal who created it. That will reveal who is the author of it. Maybe if you're just thinking about where are we going for the next couple of months, I want to tell you just in terms of the book of 1 Timothy, here's what I would say. 1 Timothy is a charge, all right, to see the evidence of God in the church.

You could say it like this. It is a charge for the value of God and the gospel to be made evident in the church of Jesus Christ, that there would be a different community among us than there is in the world, that in the church, you would see things that are a little crazy to the world. You would see a people who honor their leaders and leaders who don't lord over the people who have voluntarily decided to follow them. You would see a multigenerational, multiethnic expression of what community and family can look like. You would see all this kind of stuff in the church that you don't see out there.

You would see it in here, and the idea is that the proof is in the pudding, that the interaction with it would show you something about God. Now let me say this right up front, all right, because in a series about church, I know at Mercy Hill, especially in a season like this, there are going to be people right here at Regional. There are going to be people at High Point, at Northeast. There's going to be people at Clifton today.

There's going to be people at Espanol even, all right, that are thinking like this today. Man, I'm giving this thing another shot, but I'm going to tell you something. My experience of the church has been anything but reflective of a divine creator. Some of you may be here today and you say, man, you don't know how unbelievably mean the students were in that church. They were bullies. Or maybe you might say, hey, my family feels very forgotten. You know, there was some things that went on, and we were just forgotten, and everybody kind of moved on. Or maybe, God forbid, but maybe you would say, man, when I was growing up, there was an experience in my life or an experience in somebody else's life that was absolutely abusive, and it was connected to the church. And here's what I would say to you. Man, our heart breaks over that, but you know whose heart really breaks over that?

God's heart breaks over that. And here's what I don't want you to carry for the rest of your life, and so I'm going to push right here, and I'm going to say, man, don't judge the real thing because of an experience maybe with the wrong thing. All right? Now, are you saying, Andrew, are you saying Mercy Hill is like the real thing? I'm going to tell you what we are. We're real in this sense that we look at 1 Timothy, and we say, man, that's what we desire to be. Now we're imperfect, and we fail every single day, okay?

And all the people in this room and at our campuses are imperfect, and we fail every single day. But I can at least say, man, the real bottom desire of our heart is that somebody would interact with the local church here, and it would speak to the divine creator that has created it. That's where we're going to go over the next couple of months, all right?

But here's what I want to go for this weekend, and it really is a first things first, kind of literally in the book, and also maybe just an order of importance. Man, if you want to have the proof in the pudding, if you want the fruit that comes out in the church to be indicative of a God who has created it, then first order importance is you have to guard the doctrine. You have to guard the teaching.

So here's what we're going to go this weekend. False teaching leads to fake fruit. False teaching leads to fake fruit. When the experience of the church does not end up being indicative of a divine creator who created it. You know what Paul's going to say to a young Pastor Timothy today? Hey, maybe what the problem is, and many times more often than not, is that you get way upstream, and the doctrine is off, and false teaching is being sown into the church. And when false teaching is being sown into the church, what you're going to end up reaping is a false fruit.

And that's what we're going to talk about this weekend. We have to guard the doctrine of the church, all right? First Timothy chapter one, here's what it says. I'm going to read a bunch of scripture this weekend, okay?

So we got to just kind of settle in, and we're really going to try for the next couple months to get our mind all the way around this book in the best way that we can. Here's what it says, chapter one, starting in verse three. Get this, this is what the fruit ought to be, stewardship and love, okay? Stewardship of what God has given, and the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, and a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Paul begins this letter to a young Pastor Timothy. Young Pastor, growing church, okay? Every church has got issues.

Ephesus has got issues, all right? And he gives them this letter, and what does he say to them? As a first order of importance, Timothy, I have left you there so that you might charge certain persons that they would stop teaching things that are contrary to what I have given you.

Now this is one thing that's interesting, at least to me. If you're going to tell somebody to stop the false doctrine, it must mean that by mid-first century AD, there was already a body of doctrine that was accepted. There was already a body of things that were accepted and settled on by the early church that said this is right doctrine, this is wrong doctrine, and what Paul is saying to Timothy is, man, as a pastor of this church, as a leader in the movement, you have got to stop the false teaching because the false teaching will end up coming out in bad fruit later.

Now this is what's interesting to me, and I'm zooming out a little bit before we get into the particulars here, but here's what I want you to see right off the bat. He doesn't only begin the letter to Timothy in this way, but he actually ends the letter to Timothy in exactly the same way. You can turn there if you want, or you can just see it on the screen quickly here, but go all the way to the end of the book, 1 Timothy 6, chapter 6, verse 20. Look at this, avoid the irreverent babble and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge, for by professing it some have swerved from the faith.

Grace be with you. Now before we get into particulars, this is all I'm trying to get you to see is this, okay? He not only begins the letter with watching out for false doctrine, he ends the letter by saying watch out for false doctrine, and as if that weren't enough, dead smack in the middle of the letter in chapter 4, we're going to get into this here in a few minutes, he says, oh and by the way, you need to guard the doctrine because there are demonic demons that are influencing deceptive teachers, and they are coming into the church. Don't you understand what I'm saying? First, if you were to order the book of 1 Timothy as a sandwich from Subway, okay, it would be called the rebuke false teacher sandwich. Alright, it's both sides, and it's in the middle, alright?

It starts, it ends, and all that's in the middle, and what is he saying? You need to guard the doctrine. Now before I get in to some of the particulars on guarding doctrine and what that means in our day today, I think we just need to let the weight of how much Paul assigns to this letter, this idea of false teaching and false knowledge and irreverent babblings and however else you want to say it, I think we've got to let the weight of that just sit on us for a moment and realize, and I'm going to kind of restate what I said in the intro here, guys, when you sow false teaching you will reap fake fruit.

There will be things that look a little bit like fruit, but they're fake, and what he's saying here is this is what we have to watch out for. When the experience of the church is not exactly one that connects like the piece of art to the artist or the pudding to the to the person who made it, when it's like the church experience is not connecting to a divine creator, one of the first places that we must look is who is teaching what? What is being poured in?

What is being poured in? What is the church consuming? What is being sown in the teaching that is coming up with this fruit?

Let me give you a couple of examples of this, all right? If you sow the teaching of works-based righteousness, if you sow week after week the teaching works-based righteousness, you better be good to God and God will be good by you, okay? If you do the right things, He'll let you and you do the wrong things and He'll kick you out. If you sow works-based teaching, you will reap fear. That's what will come out and it will look like obedience on the outside, a quaking obedience, but it will be fear. If you sow in a teaching that says the Bible is subordinate to cultural norms of the day, all right? So if we just go ahead and we say, hey, the Bible is gonna, when the Bible comes up against the culture when it turns to sexual ethic, the Bible loses, the culture wins. When you sow that, you will reap a people who have no backbone and no foundation and are absolutely blown by the wind. Hey, what's going on in culture? Oh, that's what we believe, right?

What's going on over here? Oh, that's what we believe. That's what you'll sow. If you end up teaching about a God who would never send anybody to hell, you know what you'll raise? You'll raise a generation of sappy sentimentality type people.

It looks like love, but it ain't love because you can't have love without truth. You understand what I'm getting at? Like if you go upstream and you don't guard what is being poured in.

Bible is authoritative, it is sufficient. Man, once, you know, faith once delivered to all the saints, the gospel, the big issues of trinity and ex nihilo creation, and the efficiency, sufficiency of scripture. Like if you start wobbling on that stuff, you go downstream and what you'll end up with is you'll end up with a bunch of fake fruit.

Some of it might even look okay, a little bit on the outside, but what you'll end up with, man, is something that is not the real thing. And that's what he's getting out here. As he says, you have got to guard the doctrine. Now let's get into the particulars for just a minute, all right?

This is what's going to frustrate you though because it frustrates me. Paul don't get into the particulars a ton, all right? He said, I mean, you can go back and read the commentaries. All the commentaries are trying to name what's the heresy, you know, exactly what is it that's being taught falsely and all that kind of stuff. And Paul has like got the foresight to say, man, it's named something today, it'll be saying something different tomorrow. 2,000 years later, it'll be different sitting in the United States of America in 2022. So he don't give us a bunch of names here, okay?

What he gives us is some things to watch out for, and that's what I want to get into as well. Look what it said in verse three again, as I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine. Don't you understand? It's not about the identity, it's sort of about the effect, all right? And here's what the effect is. The effect is they devote themselves to myth and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than stewardship. If what you're getting is speculations, which I'm going to define, instead of stewardship, then you go upstream and you realize, man, we're probably devoting ourselves to myth and genealogies and these types of things. It says in verse five, the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Paul's not ultra clear about exactly what he is dealing with, but here is what he's clear about, all right? I've got two very broad categories that I want to talk about this weekend from 1 Timothy that talks a little bit about false teaching really no matter what generation you end up in, okay? Whether we're here, whether it's back in the Bible times, there's two things, and there's more than this we can get into, all right? But there's two things very clearly from the scripture today in the book of 1 Timothy that are indicative of false teaching. There is the devotion to what is wrong and there is the denial of things and the denial of the wrong things, okay?

We're going to get into both of those. The first is this, false teaching is devoted to the wrong things. Rather than being devoted to right doctrine, the things that are very clear in scripture, all right, where the Bible has spoken and has shouted and we should trumpet and shout, rather than that, you have a people who are focusing on periphery, things that are not even true, things that maybe even are unknowable, all right?

Or things that are just downright absolutely false and this is what they're focused on. It's a bunch of folklore, cultural kind of stuff that has crept into the church and he names it in two ways. Remember what they were? Myths and genealogies, okay? Myths and genealogies. Now, what does he mean by myths? A myth is very simple. A myth starts in truth and ends in a lie, all right? That's kind of how a myth is. A myth is like, man, there's elements of it that are right and then you keep listening and you're like, wait a minute, that's not right, you know?

That it sounded right but it's not right. I remember being confronted with one of what I would consider to be, I think what he's getting at here, a myth whenever I was on one of the mission trips that we take to the high jungle of Peru, okay? And it wasn't among the people that we were going to reach but the same missionaries we were hanging out with were telling us a story about another tribe that was there in that same kind of region and they said, hey, it's funny because what ended up happening is you have the gospel enter these areas a few hundred years ago, a form of the gospel, you had different missionaries come and all that, but then through wars and through political stuff they get kicked out and some of the stories kind of morph over years and then when we go back and re-engage, all the sudden this stuff's a little bit, so for example, okay, they're talking to this one lady and she starts to talk about the gospel. Jesus Christ, Son of God, comes, virgin birth, he is preaching the kingdom, does miracles, okay?

He's got his 12 followers and he's doing all the stuff, I mean, just telling the whole thing, man, ends up being tried before Pontius Pilate, it ends up on the cross and ends up from the cross saying, man, Father, forgive them for they know not what they do and then he turned into a lamb and flew to heaven, the end. It's like, whoa, okay? You know, that got off the rails real fast, right?

It's like, man, we were doing pretty good and then all of a sudden it was like, whoa, what just happened right there? Starts in truth, ends in a lie. This is the idea. It starts, it's building with the truth and then kind of we're taking it wherever it goes. You ever heard of the intellectual elite on the college campus, for example, with some of our students? I know some of our college students are back, we're so happy that you guys are getting back, the big weekend for you guys next weekend, but man, I think about some of our students who sit and they hear, oh yeah, Jesus was a literal person, yes, he gathered, he preached kingdom, he did incredible work and then he died on the cross and absolutely did not resurrect because he was just a man. It's like it started kind of, there started, you had some truth in that, you know?

And then all of a sudden it gets way off real fast. Man, it's a myth. What Paul is saying is that these guys are playing around with all this stuff that they couldn't know, stuff that's directly false, I mean all the, they're playing around with it rather than camping on what they know to be true in the right doctrine. I'll give you another thing he says here, he says the idea of genealogies, okay? Now what is this idea of genealogies? Apparently the people were obsessed with family heritage, thinking that that would lead them to a greater standing before God. The point is, here's my point that I'm making, they felt as if, and certain persons in the church were teaching, if you will, yeah Jesus crossed, yes, yes, yes, got it, okay? But it's plus the myths, it's plus the genealogies, okay? Yes, Jesus crossed, got it, resurrection, all that. Plus, if you're the certain Jew that can, you know, get your genealogy back, then you'll have another blessing or whatever it is, right? It's Jesus plus something here is what they're doing.

And what they're saying is, you must devote yourself to these things and that's what these teachers were doing. I think about this in our day even more. I'm like, man, these modern genealogies of I have greater insight and I have greater access just based on who I am. You know, when I was coming up as a kid into early teenage years, I remember this big book that came out about the Bible code.

Now I might be stepping on some toes here, okay? But I remember this and it's like what? Well, if you go back to the language and you can do the acrostic just right and you can count just right and have all the numbers, it's going to talk to you about what's coming in World War III and all that. As if the Bible couldn't just be plain about what it wants to be plain about. Oh, so you have got this secret code and that makes you closer to God. Oh, that's not a genealogy at all, right? That's not a myth at all.

I think about that or I even think about maybe a little closer to home. I may have people that want to endlessly argue over issues that honestly Christians can agree to disagree on. It's a complete argument all the time about God's role in sovereignty and election and salvation or it's an endless argument all the time about the end times theology and it's sort of like, man, I don't know if being right about that is going to give you a closer insider or something like that, but maybe it would be that, man, God just wants us to take what is plain and run down the field, you know, with it as far as we can and be accountable with the things that we do know. Look what it says, one verse four, promote speculations rather than stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love. The false teaching that is promoting a false devotion devoted to the wrong things, okay?

What is it ultimately doing? It's ultimately creating baseless kind of convictions around things that may or absolutely may not be true. That's what speculation is and what the Bible is getting us to see is no, no, right doctrine, that flows down into stewardship and love.

All right, I told you guys this. I know there's a lot of scripture in here, right? We're going to keep getting in a little bit further here, but I told you we're talking about devotion to the wrong things and we're going to talk about denying the wrong things, right?

Now let me explain this a little bit. We got to wade out into a little bit of deeper waters here to understand this second part of false teaching, but look what it says. Well, I'm going to get into verse six in just a minute. Let me go ahead and say this. False teaching denies the wrong things, okay? So devoted to the wrong things denies the wrong things, but here's what we start to pick this up. I want to read you a passage out of chapter one. Talk about it for just a minute.

Then we're going to switch to chapter four and we're going to see kind of the same idea. Look what this says. Now you got to get your thinking cap on.

You got to really lock into this if you're going to catch it, okay? Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion. Now this is where he's getting into the law here. Desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. Now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and the disobedient.

That's the issue. What is the law for? The Old Testament laws of God. Is it so people have rules that they can keep in order to make God love them? They can keep themselves just.

Or is the law for something else? For the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, for the sexually immoral, for men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine in accordance with the Gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Now the false teachers devoted themselves to some things, right?

Myths and genealogies. But you know what else they do? They misinterpret the reason that God has given the law in the Old Testament.

And now they are trumpeting it as a way to be just. If you just do X, Y, and Z, then you will be okay before God. If you will deny yourself these sinful passions, then you will be okay before God. What they're saying is that these laws are a way to be justified before God. Guys, if we only have the Old Testament, maybe some of this would be unclear, but when you get to the New Testament and you begin to read the Apostle Paul, you realize this. The laws of God show us our need for a Savior.

That is what they do. It isn't like, oh, I've got a list of rules, so I can just go ahead and do all these things, and then I'll be justified before God. Actually, no you won't, because you can't. All right, you were born altogether in sin. You have absolutely no chance of keeping God's law perfectly before him. What does the law do? Well, you know, in Romans 5, here's what it says.

This is interesting to me. Romans 5, 20 says this, Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more. What is he saying? He's saying the law came in that the trespass would increase, not decrease. The false teachers in Ephesus are using the law to say, hey, deny yourself sexual immorality.

Deny yourself the hatred and rage and murder that is in your heart, and if you will devote to myths and genealogies, and deny yourself all these other sinful passions that we see from the law, then you will suddenly be okay before God if you just do the right things. And Paul is saying, man, you completely miss the point of the law. The law is there to expose. When the law comes in, it's not like, oh, I can, I can, this actually helps me in being just before God.

No, it doesn't. The law comes in and trespass increases. You see the wickedness of your own heart. It is like an x-ray machine.

It looks in and sees. You know, we were gone for four or five weeks this summer. Last summer, we did part one of a sabbatical. This summer, we ended up doing part two.

I would love to talk to you guys more about that. It was incredible. We love being a part of church that wants to care for their pastors in this way, seven-year cycle to kind of help us be healthy, and so, man, it was an incredible trip. But one of the, one of my highlights of the trip is just traveling with my son, Benaiah, okay? Now, if you, if you, some of y'all are brand new, all right, and my son, Benaiah, is full of life. When you name a kid Benaiah, you're in for a ride, all right? I mean, what is Benaiah? You know, if you know Benaiah the Bible, Benaiah was the character in the Bible that killed a lion in the pit on a snowy day, apparently because he was that bad, okay? He could do it, and so he did it, and so, anyway, Benaiah, we've had a lot of stories about Benaiah since he was young and all of that, but the, the fun, the funnest thing about Benaiah is he's just full of life and all that, and he has not flown on an airplane, and we had a chance to fly on an airplane. Maybe it wasn't his literal first time, but kind of the first time he could remember, first time I was with him, and he was so pumped, man, looking out the window and all that kind of stuff, and we take off, and we start to bank about this far, and Benaiah grabs my arm, and he says, hold on, dad, he's doing a barrel roll, okay?

Dude, he was ready for the flip, you know, but the, the reason I bring that up is because, of course, you know, you got a kid like Benaiah full of life. Oh yeah, we go through the little machines, and they pull him aside because he has a knife in his backpack, okay? So, you know, we're, he's thinking he's gonna get taken off by the TSA, and we're doing this whole, you know, thing, but my point in that is like, you know, they run the little thing through, and what are they doing? They're, they're looking in. They're seeing what is there, right? It's the same way if you break your arm or something like that.

The x-ray machine doesn't fix you, but it shows, right? It shows what's up, and this is the essence of the problem here in chapter one is like, man, no, the law isn't there for you to say, I can keep these rules and be just before God. It exposes what is there, and it sends you and I on a search for a Savior. They devote themselves to some things, they deny. Hey, if you just deny yourself this, deny yourself that, look what it, continue with it in chapter four. Look what it says, now the Spirit expressly says in the latter times, some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared.

Now what, look what they say here, okay? Who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth? For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. The issue isn't just the Old Testament law, you understand? What he's saying is false teaching that is stemming from demonic influence.

That is a tough thing for us to just say out loud, but this is the reality of it. Many deceptive teachers are influenced under demonic teachings and influences, and it don't look like what you think it would look like. It might look very pious, and it might look on the outside like, oh they're very devoted.

They won't even, they forbid even to get married. They must be very devoted to God. They only eat x, y, and z, and they must be very, and what he's saying is, oh no, no, no, what you're trying to do is nothing short of saying, Jesus, your cross, your blood, your resurrection was insufficient. Because what I got to do is trust the gospel and know the myths. What I got to do is trust the gospel and make sure my lineage is in the genealogies. What I got to do is trust the gospel and keep the Old Testament law. What I got to do is trust the gospel and then come up with a bunch of new stuff, you know, don't don't drink, cuss, smoke, or chew, or date girls who do, okay? And if I can do that, then I'm going to be okay before God, and this is and this is where we, is it kind of, guys I know I've gone hard, is it sort of falling open now a little bit?

Is it sort of kind of cracking open where we can see? Paul doesn't talk so much about the identity of the false teaching, but its effects is a works-based righteousness. Its effects is something that undermines the gospel. In essence, what you see in the false teaching in 1st Timothy is this, Jesus plus something is the gospel, but here's the problem, actually Jesus plus anything is not the gospel. Jesus plus my works, it's not the gospel. Jesus plus where I come from, it's not the gospel. The gospel as fleshed out in the greatest theological treaties on earth, the book of Romans, okay? The gospel is Jesus sufficient alone. It is, this is, if you're like, man, you're saying gospel a bunch of times, what does it mean?

I'm going to give you exactly what it means, okay? There's multiple places you can go in the Bible for this, read the book of Romans, read 1st Corinthians chapter 15, okay? You can go to many places, it's very, it's actually, it's, you know, it's shallow enough for a child to understand and deep enough that an elephant can swim, as one has said, okay?

It's deep, but it's also accessible. Here's what the scripture is saying, when I say the gospel, this is what I mean, that you and I in our sin are separated from God, okay? There is no amount of devotion or denial that overcomes that.

There's no amount of like, man, I know the myths, I know the genealogies, I've memorized this, I've memorized that, I don't do this, I don't do that, there's none of that. When we have sinned, the ship sailed, all right? Because God has demanded of us, as Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, a perfect life. And so when we sin, it's over. But God in His infinite grace and mercy, He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, to come and to walk in our shoes, to live a life that we didn't live. You and I sin at every turn, Jesus never sinned, but at the end of His life, rather than reaping the rewards of a righteous life before God, He went to the cross for us. All of our sin on His shoulders, the chastisement put on Him, and He goes to the cross and He dies. Why did He die? He died because that's the penalty of sin.

The wages of sin is death. So Jesus dies in our place, and then, praise God, three days later, He wakes up. The same spirit that we're going to receive when we become a believer wakes Him up in the grave, and He is able to come bursting forth from the grave, and when He does, He founds a new humanity. And this is what, for 2,000 years, people like me, ordinary individuals and Christians like you have been spreading this movement all over the globe, where we say, hey, in His resurrection, He came out of that grave with His hand like this, saying, come on.

You can come to me. You come and accept me, and what is true of me will be true of you. You'll be united with me, and you can walk in the newness of life, and you won't be defined by your greatest failures. You can have the newness of life, and this is the gospel, and what I think 1 Timothy is trying to get us to see is this. When we feel the need to go beyond that, we will dive into false teaching, which will lead to fake fruit, but if we will stay rock solid on the simple, profound gospel message, then what we can end up seeing is a redeemed people who are not perfect in a church like Mercy Hill who fails every single day, but we can say, man, we're aiming at being kind of the proof is in the pudding here. Like that's what we're aiming at.

We're aiming at being a community that seems like it has been redeemed by the God of the universe. Now, all right, here's what we do. What do we do from here?

Okay, all right, so got it. Man, a lot of teaching. Man, what do we do? Here's the big application for this weekend on our campuses.

You guys can jot this down if you want to. What I'm going to call us to do is to detect error by taking in the truth, okay? So by way of application, we've seen the dangers. We've seen what it is. Now, 2,000 years later, what should we do because of it?

What I want to call you guys to do is to be a church that takes in the truth. Now, here's the thing. You know how you detect error? You detect error not by focusing on what is counterfeit. You focus on the real thing. When people are trained to spot counterfeit dollar bills, you know what they look at all day long for months on end? They look at the real thing. And when they see the wrong thing, it jumps out at them. It's the same way with art critics. Art critics can tell you that one's real, that one's a fake.

They can't even tell you why. They're just like, man, I know it. I've seen a million pieces of art that were the real thing, and I can spot a fake. And there's a principle in that for us. I think we need to be sharp on some of the heresies and some of the things that are going on, and I'm going to actually mention a few of those things here in our day. But generally speaking, what I want to call us to is we have people who are pushing to be sharp on the Word of God, and how can we do that?

I got three quick ways we can do that. Number one, what we need to do is sit under gospel-centered preaching, all right? We need to sit under gospel-centered preaching, and what I mean by that, for Mercy Hill Church, okay, there are great preachers on the Internet. There are great preachers on YouTube. Maybe we could check them out. Maybe we could be part of that.

I'm going to talk about other resources in a minute. But if you're part of the church here, what that means is, you know, usually we take a week off right around the Christmas season, you know, in terms of a Sunday for our staff and stuff. But that means there's 51 sermons a year that are getting pumped out here on the weekends, and you have an opportunity to take them all the way in and go wrestle with them in community in group, all right, whether we're in group session or whether you're just doing that with your friends here at Mercy Hill. And that's what I want to call you to do, is to devote yourself to the teaching of the Word that is here.

You know, sit under it. Man, I'm not going to miss one. Man, I'm going to be here 51 weeks.

I can do that. If we do miss, we're going to go back and listen to it. And here's one of the reasons why I say that. Some of you, and some of you might want to email me about this. I'll go ahead and save you the email, okay, so I'll just answer the question right now. All right, some of you are like, yeah, but isn't individual Bible reading more important than that? No. Is individual Bible reading important? Yes.

Okay, very important. Is it more important than hearing the Word taught and then taking it into community to be broken open? It really isn't.

And you say, where do you get there? Well, here, one of the reasons I would say that is because what that idea of me and Jesus in my coffee cup in the Bible every single morning is a little modern. I mean, that'd be a little foreign to the New Testament. When you look at, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do it. Actually, I'm going to say we should do it.

That's going to be my second thing we should do. But you got to understand this. These letters were written to churches, not Christians. That idea of like, I'm a Christian, but I'm not in a community of the, you see what I mean?

That's a modern invention in America here, okay? This is not, you go to the persecuted church around the world, not happening. I'm a Christian, not part of a church.

No. You go to the early church. This idea of Christian, but not church is just a total, what I'm calling you to do is to say, hey, if you're going to do nothing else, fully devote yourself to hearing the Word taught and then take it into group and be the type of person who is willing to say, I want to see how the Spirit's wanting to push me around in this.

And I'm going to be open to that, all right? Now, the second thing is, and this is what, and I don't want to, the first one here is intentionally a little bit abrasive, shocking, but guys, I want to make sure you understand. Man, we push everybody at Mercy Hill to be an avid Bible reader, okay? I mean, there should not be a Christian here at Mercy Hill that is not taking in the Word for themselves. And that's what I want to call you to do. Read your Bible.

This is what we ought to be doing. Hey, if you're like, man, I don't really know how to read the Bible. Let me give you a quick way to think about it, okay? Quick way to think about reading the Bible. Read something from the Psalms, read the book of Proverbs, take the chapter of whatever day it is that day, do those two things, and then have a book in the New Testament or the Old Testament that you're just going through on a rhythmic basis. You could read three chapters a day and get a ton of Bible influence in your life, okay?

And you should be doing that day in, day out. If you're like, but when I'm reading it, what am I supposed to do? You're supposed to do the same thing that we do when we preach at Mercy Hill.

Don't you think don't you understand every single second of a sermon is one of three things. It's either an explanation, it's an illustration, or it's an application. That's all it is. So when I'm reading the Bible, what I've got to be doing is saying, what does this mean?

What is it like? Like, how can I think about it another way that might make it pop in my head? Like, what's, oh, that's kind of like this, or that's kind of like that. And then the third thing is, man, how does, how do I apply it to my life? And how does my life begin to move around because of this? Thirdly, and finally, I would say, hey man, look for other resources that are good for you because we're not all in the same life stage.

Some of you are like, man, I'm going through a season of parenting in this way, or somebody in my community group is walking through some type of big diagnosis and I'm not exactly sure how to handle that or talk to them about that. There are great resources, but every resource that says Bible ain't great, okay? All right, there are good resources out there. I'm hoping this week we can put out some things that we trust and maybe you can be led in that, but I would say these are a distant third to the first two, all right?

Distant third. I love podcasts, I love YouTube, I love reading other books, but it's really almost not even the same race. You need to hear preaching from your pastors, take that into community group and read your Bible, all right? And those are the things that we need to devote ourselves to. Hey, if you're looking for other resourcing on something, I want to say something on behalf of our campus pastors. Every single one of our campus pastors would invite a call or an email from you over an issue that you're dealing with that you're looking for resourcing on.

They would love to help point you in the right direction with some of these things. They would love to do that, all right? Now, let me say this and I'm going to say this and then we're going to start moving toward a close here, okay? All right, so let's say we do what I'm saying. Let's say we decide, all right, I'm going to devote myself to the teaching of the local church and the authority of the elders that God has put over me in my local church.

I'm going to do that, number one. Very close to that is reading my Bible, all right? I'm going to read my Bible and I'm going to get to know the Scripture and that kind of thing and I'm going to do that every day. Here's what's going to happen in your life.

You know what's going to happen? You're seeing the real thing all the time. And listen, that don't mean that we don't make mistakes, okay? I mean, your preachers, I mean, we can make mistakes, but we're aiming at the right thing. We're aiming at right doctrine and you're going to be reading the Bible and you're going to be taking it in community. You're going to be seeing the real thing. So here's what ends up happening. You're going to start spotting the wrong thing.

And you know what? I don't want to apply this by saying, hey, spot it in somebody else. Let's spot it in ourselves. Let's look at the ways that we might be susceptible, all right? A bunch of heresies have a bunch of different names, but I was just saying, man, as a pastor right now in 2022, right here, I think there's a few things that the air we breathe that we've got to be watching out that we might fall into.

The first one is prosperity teaching. We got to watch out, all right? What we get, you know, prosperity teaching, hey, all God wants for you is health and wealth and everything's supposed to be awesome. And, you know, you see the pastors in this kind of movement.

I saw a guy went viral on TikTok for yelling at his congregation about not buying him a luxury watch, okay? And I mean, you see this kind of stuff and we're all sort of like, but man, can that creep in? That we begin to think, man, I follow Jesus and therefore I think I'm owed something in this life. I feel like I'm owed some kind of, you know, good life or great thing. Hey, what we got, I'm looking at the real thing.

Well, what does the real thing say? The real thing shows me Paul's sufferings and the martyrdom of the early church. And maybe it's not so much about the blessings that I will receive because I've earned this before God prosperity teaching. No, hey, another one is works-based theology, all right? Where even as a gospel believer, as one who has been redeemed, we can still fall into the performance trap of, man, if I get off that hamster wheel, God's going to kick me out and He's going to do the wrong thing.

And then this comes up all the time. Hey, this past week, this past weekend, I wasn't preaching here, but I did get to preach at redemption in Roanoke, Virginia, which was just the most incredible thing to go to one of our church plants and be able to preach there and it was awesome. And I took a couple of our folks with us. I took Rachel and Josiah with us, their resident and staff members here. And so we were driving up there and Josiah was driving and I now call him Josiah Leadfoot Roethlisberger after this, okay?

So you understand what happened. So anyway, we get pulled over, okay, and I'm on the way to preach and the guy comes up to the window, you know, and he's like, you know, hey guys, you know, what's going on? And he starts, you know, he starts kind of engaged in us or whatever. And so I was just, I was waiting, you know, and he finally asked the question, where are you guys going? I was like, well, I'm gonna tell you, this is the greatest, you know, I know you've heard some stories here, okay? But I'm gonna tell you, this is like a story. I said, man, I feel really bad because they're driving me so that I can be prepared. I said, you know, I'm a pastor of a church in Greensboro and we planted a church in Roanoke and I'm driving up there to preach this morning.

And if you don't believe me, I got my notes right here, okay? I mean, that's, you know, that's kind of, and he was like, now what did you say, son? Okay, he's trying to get it in his mind, you know, and he's, you know, he's trying to, and I tell him the whole story again. And you can just see the look on his face because Josiah was flying, okay? He was, he was driving, all right?

And, and so, and so we, you know, he, I could just see the look on this dude's face and he's like, give me a minute, and he walks back to his car and he's like, he's like pulling his hair, you know, and he's, he's, you know, and he comes back, he's like, give me your license, and then as he's walking away, going back to his car, he says, man, I can't give you guys a ticket. God might send me to hell giving you guys a ticket, going to plan, okay? And so he goes back to his car and we're sitting there and Rachel says to be a Josiah, the spiritual one, okay? Rachel says, guys, we have got to correct his theology on this. I was like, Rachel, we're not doing that today, okay? Somebody else, you know, I was like, somebody else can do that, okay? Well, we're not doing that today, right this second, all right? Anyway, he ended up, he ended up letting us out of the ticket, man.

He, it was kind of, it was kind of, it was kind of crazy. I think about that and it's funny, you know, but the reality is that even as a believer, guys, many of us can kind of fall back into that, man, God's going to do this because I, and what we need to do is we need to look at the real thing and what does the real thing say, man? The real thing says that you and I are a new creation in Christ.

We have been wrapped in his arms. You know, another, another thing I think that we've got to be kind of watching out for in our day today is this idea of confusing the kingdom of God with the citizens, with the citizenship of a country and it's important and listen, this, this is why I have no problem saying this because you ain't never met anybody more patriotic than me. My grandfather fought in World War II, my uncle fought in Vietnam. If you want to know how patriotic my family is, come join us for 4th of July one time and if you wear sleeves, you're not invited, okay? That's kind of what the way, the way it goes, all right? No, I'm being serious. I think America is the greatest country on earth.

I love it. I mean, I thank God every day that I'm born here but the reality is that I'm watching a lot of people in our culture get one thing big time confused, Philippians 3 says we are a citizen of heaven first. Now we're a citizen of this country.

We got a lot of duties and responsibilities that come with that but we're a citizen there first, right? I mean, there's so many different things that we can end up getting into. We confuse the kingdom, we confuse, we have prosperity teaching. Hey, another one I think I can get into is the subordination of the Bible to cultural norms. I've seen this all the time. Man, our young people are allowing the Bible to go to war with our culture and letting the Bible lose and saying, hey, you know, the cultural norms should and what the scripture is telling us is in 2 Timothy 3 16 that the scripture is God, it's inspired by God himself.

We got to stand on that. I could go into more and more but you know what? The way that we detect those things is by staring at the truth and we end up doing that all centered and I'll close with this. We do that centered in the church, in the local church is where these things are fleshed out. That's why I was saying earlier, man, these letters aren't written, you know, these letters aren't written to just individual Christians.

They're written for like the church. You know, look at what 1 Timothy 3 15 says, I'll close this. If I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and a buttress of truth. It's hard to stand in the truth without being connected integrally into the life of a local and to the life of a local church with other believers, with elders that are watching over you.

This is what God has for us and I want to call you to that. We have a lot of college students around our church, man. We love campus ministries. They're not a church. If I was in college right now, I'd probably be a part of one but I would also have a church. You know, for many of us, it's like maybe you're coming around, you kind of have this religious thing but are you locked in with the elders stand before God and say they were part of the flock.

Man, I would love to have you come to The Weekender next weekend and start trying to hammer some of those things out. See what our doctrine is. Understand we follow the Baptist Faith and Message 2000. Some of us might not even know what that is.

Like what a creed, you know, what a creed kind of thing is. Hey, that's what we do at The Weekender. We'd love to have you come and check that out. All right, let's pray. Father, I pray that in showing a vision for doctrine and false teaching, God, that we would be a people who would lean in to the local expression of the church here. God, I pray that Mercy Hill would be a church, Lord, that when people interact with it, they are able to say the proof is in the pudding.

Not that we get everything right, we fail every day. But God, I pray you would do something extraordinary here as your spirit moves in the individual believers who are being built up into a house. Father, I pray for those that are brand new this weekend. And Lord, we are so looking forward to this kindergarten commissioning coming up. God, I just pray for those families, teach their kids these truths. God, and I pray that maybe some of them would be caught today and decide to lean in. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.