Separating the True Gospel from False Ones

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Crear. How do you live out the faith in a really difficult immoral place? How do you handle it when you're what you believe is is despised and belittled constantly? Where most people find what you believe at best irrelevant.

At worst, they find it just downright silly. Paul writes the book of Titus to answer those questions. Thanks for joining us here on Summit Life with Pastor J.D. Grear of the Summit Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.

As always, I'm your host, Molly Vitovich. Today, we're kicking off a brand new teaching series called Everyday Theology. It's a study in the book of Titus, and we're going to see how the gospel changes and shapes our everyday life. You know, theology isn't just about learning a bunch of fancy words or super confusing concepts.

Biblical theology is practical, and it changes not only what we believe, but the way that we interact with the world. So let's jump right into this first message Pastor J.D. titled it separating the true gospel from false ones. You have your Bible, and I invite you to take it out and open it to the book of Titus, which is about halfway through the New Testament. It is what we call a pastoral epistle, which means a letter that Paul wrote to another pastor. This is one from Paul to Titus, who was a church planter in Crete. Incidentally, by the way, the book of Titus is the only book written specifically to a church planter. Now, if you know your Bible, you're like, well, what about Timothy? Wasn't he a church planter?

Actually, no. Timothy worked in already established churches. Titus is a church planter on the gates of hell. Crete, which is where Titus was assigned, was one of the most immoral places in the ancient world. Crete was like, think of it as the Las Vegas of the Mediterranean, except it was an island in the Mediterranean and also the hub for piracy in the Mediterranean, which was actually a pretty bad problem. So think of it like the first century Tortuga, or maybe, you know, the Roman Empire, or maybe, basically Titus is trying to plant churches among the cast of the pirates of the Caribbean.

Historians say that the people there stayed drunk all the time. Lying was a celebrated art form. In fact, in the Greek language, Crete was slang for lying. The historian Polybius said that nowhere in the ancient world were politicians more corrupt and was even public policy and the laws bent toward the protection of the rich and the powerful than in Crete. Even the apostle Paul would say to Titus, look in your Bible, chapter 1, verse 12, Paul says, Even one of their own prophets has said, Cretans are always liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons. And this testimony is true. You say, well, that's rude, Paul. What happened to all that? I'm the chief of sinners stuff. Paul's like, hey, their guy said it.

I'm just saying he was onto something. Some of you are like, liars, evil brutes, lazy gluttons. I feel like you're describing my fraternity. I feel like you're describing my workplace, which makes the book of Titus incredibly relevant. How do you live out the faith in a really difficult immoral place like Crete? How do you handle it when what you believe is despised and belittled constantly?

Where most people find what you believe at best irrelevant, at worst, they find it just downright silly. Paul writes the book of Titus to answer those questions. Paul has one concern for Titus in this book, and it is, and I quote, The truth that leads to godliness. The truth that leads to godliness. In the very first verse, chapter 1, verse 1, Paul says that. Paul, a servant of God and an apostle of Jesus Christ for the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the, everybody together, truth that leads, okay, when I say everybody together, I mean like everybody, right?

This is the audience participation part of the program, so let's do it again. For the faith of God's elect and the knowledge of the truth that leads to godliness. That phrase, truth that leads to godliness, or at least that concept, is gonna come up over and over throughout this book. You see, God's purpose in the gospel was to create for himself a God-loving and God-like people. That's what godliness means. That was the point in what he did.

When God saved us, he saved us for himself. I saw the new Exodus movie recently, Gods and Kings with, you know, Christian Bell and all that. I don't want to hate on it. I mean, it was actually pretty good. It took a lot of liberties, meaning that a lot of things that weren't in the story, they put in, and a lot of things that were in the story, they left out.

For example, you know, Moses is more of a gladiator-style general who ends up doing hand-to-hand combat with Pharaoh in the basin of the Red Sea when that whole incident goes down, and that didn't really happen in the actual account. But one of the things that they left out, that I was most disappointed they left out, is Moses has one line that he's famous for, right? One line he's famous for down through history.

What is it? Let my people go. Not one time in the movie did Moses say that. But what people always leave out, even the accounts that are more biblically faithful, and I'd never seen a movie that included the second part of what Moses said, and that's the most important part of what he said. Moses said, let my people go, God says, that they might serve me. That's the more important part of what Moses said, because the Exodus, listen, was not about what God was delivering them from. It was about what God was delivering them to. And what God delivered them to was to himself.

He was calling out for himself a people that would worship him and know him. That's his point in the gospel. Christians talk a lot about what we are saved from, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but what we're saved from is not nearly as important as what we're saved to, and what we're saved to is godliness, and what godliness is is the love of God, and it is learning to love the things that God loves. So therefore, Paul says, one of the ways you can authenticate true religion from false religion is by how well it cultivates godliness in your heart. Does that make sense?

If that's been the whole point, then you ought to be able to tell that one of the characteristics of the true gospel is that it actually cultivates godliness in your heart. Not busyness, by the way, in religion. That's different. Religions, every religion will make you insanely busy. Religions come with a list of things to add to your calendar, a list of things you should do and not do, say and not say, drink or not drink, not smoke, not do this, not touch that.

There's all kinds of things that will make you crazy busy. Paul says godliness is different. Godliness is something that goes down to the passions of your heart. It affects what you love.

It affects the attitudes of your heart. There were all kinds of false teachers in Crete, just like there are all kinds of false teachers today. And he says these false religions are going to get you busy, but they're not actually going to cultivate godliness. So what I want to do today is show you how the apostle Paul explains why the gospel produces godliness in a way that nothing else can. Then I want to show you why every other religious approach won't work. And then I want to have you ask some evaluation questions about your church and about your faith, namely this, is your faith producing godliness? Is your faith producing godliness? Incidentally, for those of you who made a New Year's resolution, I think you'll find out here in this very first chapter of Titus why most of them do not work, why they never make it out of the month of January.

All right, so let's get started. Here's number one, how the gospel produces godliness. How the gospel produces godliness. Paul introduces this in the first verse, but he really unpacks it in chapter two. So flip over to chapter two, verse 11.

Paul says, for the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. It teaches us to say no. Here's your question, don't answer it out loud. What does it refer to? That is the most important question in the whole book.

What is the it? It teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions to live self-controlled upright and godly lives in this present age. What produces the ability to say no to ungodliness, to live self-controlled and upright?

What is it that creates it? Let me ask you, if we hadn't just read that text and I were to say to you, explain to me how you can become more self-controlled, more upright, live a better godly life, what would you say? For most of you it would be, well, I need greater willpower. Some of you would say, I need greater knowledge, I need to learn the Bible better. Some of you would say, I need an accountability partner.

I need to get in a small group because they're gonna be able to help me finish strong. I need to start a quiet time. Maybe if judgment felt more real to me, if hell was more real, maybe I would act right more. Paul's answer, not on one of those things. Paul said, listen, look at it. The grace of God teaches us to say no to ungodliness and worldly passions to live self-controlled. The grace of God, according to this text, focuses our attention in three different directions.

This is really important. The first place the grace of God directs our attention is upward, he says. You'll see it there, verse 13. We wait for the blessed hope, the glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ upward. We look upward to the glorious God that has called us to himself.

Verse 14, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness. So we look backwards to the price he paid to save us. And then he continues on, that he might purify for himself a people that are his very own, that's looking forward. So in other words, we look upward to the God who has saved us. We look backward to the price that he paid to redeem us. We look forward into the beautiful thing that he is making us into. And those three looks, upward, backward and forward, is what produces godly passion in your heart. Now, here's the question, why? Why does this produce godliness in us?

Let's take these apart one at a time. Upward, upward. The gospel redirects our worship. It redirects our worship. Sin problems, as I've often explained to you, start as worship problems. The original sin, Paul says, Romans chapter one. Paul says there are two components to the original sin.

Follow this. Component number one is false worship. Romans 1 23, we gave the glory of God to created things. Glory in Hebrew is the word kabod and means literally weight or importance. We gave the weight or the importance that we were supposed to give to God alone.

We gave that weight to something else. By the way, the New Testament word for glory is the word brilliance or beauty. If you put those two concepts together, you'll come up with a good understanding of what the Bible means when it means glory, when it says glory. Glory is whenever you give something incredible weight in your life, incredible importance, and when you find great beauty in it.

That's giving it glory. The original sin was we took the glory, the importance and the beauty that we ought to have given to God and we began to assign it to lesser things. Not bad things. Sometimes things like money, like romance, like family, like status.

I mean, good things, but they become so important to us that we just could not imagine life being good without them because they represent ultimate beauty to us. Matt Papa, one of our worship leaders in his book, Look and Live says that sin is simply worship misdirected. We never begin to worship, he said. We're born worshipers. We don't start worshiping any more than we start breathing.

He said we just misdirect our worship and that's where sin begins as we assign weight and beauty to something more than we give it to God. You're listening to Summit Life with J.D. Greer and a message titled Separating the True Gospel from the False Ones. If this teaching resonates with you and you'd like to share it with others, you can find it online at jdgreer.com. We'll be right back with the conclusion of today's message in just a moment, but first let me tell you about our newest featured resource. If you're looking for a way this year to carry God's promises in your heart and recall them more easily, our new Summit Life Memory Verse Cards just might be the answer. There are 52 cards in all, one for each week of the year, and going back over the ones you've learned and adding to that number weekly or monthly will ensure that they stay with you long-term. We offer a new pack of these each year, so be assured that this collection includes all new verses. We provide tools like this to our listeners because we know that you desire to grow in your knowledge and understanding of God's word.

So support us today by giving us a call at 866-335-5220, or give online at jdgreer.com. There are some lists of things that you have in your heart because you are an idolater and a sinner that you give more weight and more beauty to than you give to God. What is that for you? The reputation of others? Is it achieving something?

Is it sexual pleasure? I don't know what it is for you, but that's what it means to begin to sin. To change sin at the heart level, therefore, which is where God wants to change it, he's gotta change what you worship because until that happens, every change you make is superficial. God doesn't want people who act one way on the outside but whose heart belongs somewhere else. God wants us to love him and to pursue him because we desire him.

So Paul Tripp says it this way. If we worshiped our way into sin, then we gotta worship our way out. And so how do we change what we worship? The gospel, the gospel alone does that. The gospel redirects our worship because it shows us, to use Paul's word, the glorious God, verse 13, who saved us, a God that is more glorious, more beautiful, more weighty, more important than our idols.

And until the gospel does that, every change you make in religion is just superficial. It's what I've explained to you is what Martin Luther called the dilemma of the great commandment. The great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind. Here's the dilemma of that commandment. If you love something, you don't need to be commanded to love it, right? I mean, you never have to command me to eat a steak, kiss my wife, or take a nap. I love those things.

So this is just naturally, I just do it. On the flip side, if you don't love something, that cannot be fixed by command. I hate Brussels sprouts. You can command me all day long to like Brussels sprouts. I'm gonna be like, nope.

Maybe you wrap it in bacon and pour chocolate on it, maybe, but otherwise, I just hate Brussels sprouts. Luther said this is the dilemma. The dilemma is that God is commanding us to do something that we can never actually be commanded to do. If we don't love, then we can't be commanded to love, and if we do love, we don't need to be commanded to love. The way he said it was this.

What the law requires is freedom from the law. The great commandment is asking something of you that you can never be produced if you don't already do it. So the gospel actually redirects, it reignites our worship.

Here's the second thing, the backward look. The gospel restores gratefulness. In that passage that it shows you in Romans, Paul identifies a second component to the original sin, one that most people would never guess in a thousand years. All right, if I were to say, what are the original components of the original sin? You maybe would come up with false worship. You would never come up with this next one.

You'd be like, oh, pride or lust or reading Fifty Shades of Grey or something like that. That's the original corruption. No, look at this, Romans 1, 21. They neither glorified God, there's your worship, watch this, nor gave thanks. How many of you would put thanklessness as the core sin?

I'm thinking nobody. Why would thanklessness be the core sin? Well, think about it. When you're thankless, not only are you robbing somebody else of the credit that belongs to them, when you're thankless, you convince yourself that you could have gotten on fine without whatever that person gave you.

You weren't really desperate for what they gave you, which is why you don't feel incredibly thankful because you feel like, well, even if they hadn't given it to me, I would have been fine. Think of it, one author said, think of it like plagiarism. Plagiarism, when you take somebody else's ideas and you put them in your own mouth or you write them as your own, there really is two problems with plagiarism. Number one, you robbed somebody else of the credit that they are due for their words.

Number two, B, you delude yourself and others into thinking that you can come up with that level of ideas all the time. Does that make sense? I mean, think of it like, let's say I had a relative that lived in England and I went over to visit them and I'm rummaging through their attic and as I'm rummaging through their attic, lo and behold, I find a manuscript by Jane Austen who wrote Pride and Prejudice, a manuscript for a new book that she never published and nobody knew about.

This one's called Malice and Misery or Lust and Loneliness. Nobody in the world knows about this but me. I just discovered it. So I dust it off, take off her name, put my name on it, take it to the publisher and say, here's my new novel. Publisher reasons, says, this is fantastic, publishes it and it goes crazy. I got two problems. One, I stole credit from Jane Austen when I should have given it to her. Number two, my publisher thinks that I can come up with this kind of stuff all the time.

So he comes back to me and says, I need a second book and then I am in deep water. When we are thankless toward God, we have two problems. Number one, we robbed God of the glory belonging to him.

Number two, we delude ourselves into thinking that we're self-sufficient. We forget that every single breath we take comes from God. Every blessing on earth we have is a gift from him. That's why I tell my kids, a thankful spirit is not just about politeness. A thankful spirit is life-giving because in it you understand that you are dependent on God, that we're like the moon. Any light that I have that shines off of me is a borrowed light, a reflected light that comes from the sun.

You remove the sun and I will go dark. That lack of gratefulness, that self-sufficiency leads to independence which leads to more sin. Well, how does the gospel transform us? It points us backwards to the gospel to our complete inability to save ourselves.

We were hopeless. Jesus had to do it all and we receive it as a gift. And that posture of gratefulness is the fountain from which godliness springs.

Forward, here's your third look. The gospel raises expectations. It raises our expectations. In the gospel we get a glimpse of what God is making us. We get a glimpse of the future he has for us.

He puts into us a taste or a hunger for that future and it begins to shape what we love and what we pursue. John Piper was speaking recently at a conference that my wife was attending. And she said that, he's about 70 years old now, he's not in poor health or anything, but he says, you know, just being 70, I think a lot more about my death than I used to. He said, and then my wife said he just made this offhand comment, just to the side. He just said, he said, soon I will be in eternity. And then he said, sinlessness. He said, I can almost taste it.

Here's the question. When you look forward to eternity, is that what you most long for? Is that what you're looking forward to? Sinlessness. When I no longer am I under the bondage of this lust and jealousy and pride that just eats away my heart. There, I'm going to be like God. If you've experienced the gospel, that's down in there. Because when you are looking forward, here's how John said it, 1 John 3. We know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we will see him as he is. All those who have this hope in them, purify themselves, just like he is pure.

You see, these three looks, the upward look to the glory of God, the backward look to the price he paid, the forward look to what he's making us, deliver us from sin at the heart level. And then you become, verse 14, a person that is eager, zealous, or you can translate that excited to do good works. It's not that you have to do good works or God's going to punish you. You're excited about doing them.

You get to do good works. Well, by contrast, Paul says, religion, false religion can do none of those things. Go back to chapter one. In verses 10 through 16 of chapter one, Paul is going to go after some false teachers at work in Crete. Now, the particulars of what these Jewish teachers believed is not the same as what false teachers in Raleigh-Durham teach.

I don't know anybody running around teaching the same thing that these guys taught. The point is all false religion has a couple of characteristics. And any false religion in any generation in any time is going to have these characteristics that define it.

So even if the particulars are not the same, the essence behind it is, all right? Verse 10, let me show you. For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group. That was the false teachers he was going after. They must be silenced because they are ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach. And that for the sake of dishonest gain, rebuke them sharply so that they will be sound in the faith and will pay no attention to Jewish myths or to the commands of those who reject the truth. They claim to know God, but by their actions, they deny him.

They are detestable, disobedient, and unfit for doing anything good. Tell us how you really feel, Paul, all right? Number two, why religion cannot produce godliness. Why it cannot produce godliness.

Give you a couple of things here. It emphasizes adherence to rules rather than internal transformation. You see that verse 10, mere words. Verse 13, Jewish rituals and commands.

It's concerned with what you say and how you act, not what you are. All right, here's the other thing. It uses God. It uses God. You see that little phrase in verse 11, for the sake of dishonest gain? God for these people and godliness becomes a means to another end. He's the means to houses or cars or a better life now or even eternity in heaven.

They're not always bad things that you're using him for. It's just that God's not ultimately the point. Ultimately, God is a useful means to this other end.

Religion, in fact, Paul explains, leads to, listen, the opposite of godliness. Religion acts like it's promoting godliness, but the effect it has is it produces ungodliness. Instead of gratefulness, religion produces pride. Pride, those who excel at religion say, well, look at all that I've accomplished.

I'm better than other people. And that just leads to more sin, right? Because pride is the mother of a lot of sins. So if I ask you right now why God's gonna let you into heaven, and why he accepts you, and you tell me anything about you, oh, well, you know, I go to church and I'm a good person and I never killed anybody and I'm a good dad, then even it seems innocuous, but what you're basically saying to yourself is because I am better than this group of people over here, that's why God accepts me. And that leads to pride, which leads to you looking down on people, which leads to all kinds of sin. Or the flip side, if you don't do well in religion, it leads to despair. The gospel leads us to true repentance because it's not just good advice.

It's the good news. You're listening to Pastor JD Greer on Summit Life. Today's message is the first in a new teaching series called Everyday Theology. Pastor JD, since the beginning of the year, we've focused heavily on ways to create a solid start. In fact, we even had a teaching series called Start. So this study we began today continues that focus as well.

Yeah, that's exactly right, Molly. In the spirit of pressing a big reset button to start this year, we've been focusing on teaching that gives us the firm foundation that we can live, not just this year, but every year from. And we've got a couple of great books in the Bible, ones that people honestly are not as familiar with, even if they've been in church for a long time, that really established for us what we're calling Everyday Theology. The books are Titus and Philemon. And we're gonna see how the solid foundation of the gospel produces lives that reflect the gospel.

When you believe the gospel and you saturate yourself with the gospel, you become like the gospel. And so to go along with this series, we put together a pack of 52 memory verse cards for you that will help you memorize the promises of scriptures so that they can transform you, transform your prayer life and equip you to engage with doubt and struggle and temptation and to give you the faith that comes from the word of God in that moment that you need it. Take a look at these and reserve yours at jdgreer.com. Thanks, JD.

The scripture memory cards come with our thanks for your generous financial gift of $35 or more. Call right now to make your donation. That number is 866-335-5220. Or go online at jdgreer.com. I'm Molly Vidovitch. How do we keep standing on the truth when it seems like everyone is against us? Be sure to join us Friday for Answers here on Summit Life with JD Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by JD Greer Ministries.