Have you heard of kudzu? It's an aggressive-growing vine that appears attractive at first, but if you don't remove it immediately, it overtakes everything in its path and grows a foot each day. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why false teachers are like kudzu—they can seem appealing at first, but can quickly destroy the church if left unchecked. We're studying First Timothy chapter six.
Now, for men and women who wander around the fringes of religion, it is increasingly possible to be acquainted with all kinds of things, both as listeners as well as by as teachers.
So we're acquainted with it all. We're inoculated against it because we have a modicum of knowledge, and as a result of that, we're able to deflect different approaches that come our way, and we can answer in this way and answer in that because we have sufficient knowledge of the truth. But it has not arrested us. And that's the factor in relationship to these teachers. They're so full of themselves that there's actually no place for any truth inside of them.
There's no place left. They are conceited. They are controversial. They are corrupted. And the whole gospel has become commercialized.
Isn't that what he's saying? They've been robbed of the truth, and they think that godliness is a means to financial gain. Turn to Titus one. You'll see the exact same thing, and in the eleventh verse, these individuals, he says, must be silenced because they're ruining whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach.
So their content is off, and they're doing that for the sake of dishonest gain.
So there's two strikes against them: number one, the content is bogus, and number two, the motivation is wrong.
So they're selling you the wrong stuff, and they're driven by the desire to make a buck on the back of what they're selling you.
Now, so far, you have got to be impressed by my my restraint in not applying this to contemporary situations. Are you not? Good, because I'm very proud of it myself. I really am. But I don't want to do that.
It's too easy. It's sadly too easy. Where did we get this gospel that didn't have dying in it? How can you have as your as your master a dying Christ and you don't die, a suffering Christ and you don't suffer, a selfless Christ and you're full of yourself, a Christ with no home, and you building retirement homes? They see religion as a way of getting rich, and so they make a show of their godliness.
And the better the show, the larger the fee. They've donned the mask of religion in order to enrich themselves. Such individuals view their task not as a vocation or as a calling, but as a career, and so they will seek to chase down all the best options in pursuit of financial gain. Is there a place that I can go where there is a bigger fee and a bigger crowd? I'll go there.
I have an open diary. Then I try and find the best shot where I can make the biggest amount of money and impress the largest number of people and broaden the scope of my influence in the greatest way. The Greeks were intoxicated, says one commentator, with the spoken word. Among them, if a man could speak, his fortune was made. And it was against a background like that that the church was growing up.
And it is little wonder that this type of teacher invaded it. The church gave him a new area in which to display his talents, gain a tinsel prestige, and a profitable following. That is the truth. The church, provided in the first century. This context, they could never have imagined the size of the market that would be present two thousand years later.
The ability for an individual to display his talents, to gain a tinsel prestige. And a profitable following.
Now it's really easy to point the finger, but the fact of the matter is, the danger sits on your shoulder every day.
Some years ago, I spoke, and I didn't speak. I attended an event organized by one of the big three car companies in America, and. My brief was to give the invocation and the benediction, and so they had a meal, and there were two thousand people there, and I sat at a at a platform table with people that I didn't know and who didn't really care if I was there or not. And the man stood up and said, "And now the Reverend Bag will give the invocation." And so I stood up and invoked, and sat down for the next two hours. And then he said, "And now the Reverend Bag will give the benediction." And so I stood up and benedicted, and then sat down again.
In the middle of the event, in the main part of the event, was a pump 'em up speaker, a very, very good communicator, and he told these young people that had come from high schools and from the top echelons of their high school how they could go for the gold and seize the the the crown and do everything and so on. And it was really a bunch of of smoke and mirrors and had no substance to it at all. And I could remember being jealous for his opportunity, and I went away, came home, and I was some weeks later on the receiving end of a telephone call from the master of ceremonies. And the master of ceremonies said, "How we would like you to come back again next year. We do this every twelve months.
We'd like you to come back." "Oh no," I said. "No," I said. "You know, that's that's okay. I think I'm busy. I'm bending down on that day next year.
I think." And "No, no," he he he said, "We we would like you to come." And why I said it, I do not know. But quick as a shot, I said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll come if you pay me what you paid that character that spoke for half an hour." Now I don't know what he paid the character. He said, "Oh, I haven't come to the good part yet. I was just about to tell you we are going to pay you what we paid the character." Then I said, "Oh, man!
Now a minute." Because I, you know, if I'd been on the receiving end, I said, "Well, I didn't know." But now it sounds like I tried to make it happen.
So I said, "What did you pay him?" He said, "Fifteen hundred bucks." I said, "Man, that sounds pretty good." So I went and I spoke, and I took the fifteen hundred bucks, and we went on spring break or something—I don't know—and it was, it was awesome. But that day, I made a note to myself. I said, "I'm never going to do this again, ever." And every day, almost three times a week, I get letters from people asking me to speak places, and almost inevitably they say, "Will you please tell us what your fee is?" And what I discovered was. And people must work out their own salvation with fear and trembling. What I have discovered is that it is customary for people in America, once you have any measure of notoriety at all, to be able to write your own ticket to a certain within certain limits.
And suddenly, on that day, how would you ever know whether you were peddling the word of God? To make a profit, or whether you were preaching the word of God, because you've been called to preach. For me, it's impossible to do, so there's no fee. There couldn't be. There is no motivation here that is financial.
Now, am I saying this to bolster my own ego? No, I'm saying this to let you know. That when you read the Bible, don't start applying it for the guy three seats up from you. Apply it to yourself. Don't start saying, "Oh, there must be a lot of bad people out there who're doing a lot of bad things." Apply it to yourself.
You realize you on that day when I said, "Oh, I think I'll do if you pay me the same amount of money as that guy," I put one foot on a banana skin that day. And you don't have to be a genius to work out the financial benefits that can accrue once you start that. Paul says these men are driven by the desire to make financial gain from the gospel.
Now, are there consequences? Yes, there are, and I'm just going to read them to you. And we're through. Pseudo intellectualizing, intellectual theorizing doesn't come by itself. What comes with it?
Number one, envy. Envy. When you are on the receiving end of this stuff, it generates envy. When people engage in speculating about various theories, when they apply their intellectual curiosity to nothing more than trifles, they are susceptible to pride. And instead of finding submission in an agreement to the sound instruction of the Lord Jesus Christ, they become envious of those whose puerile arguments are attracting the largest following.
And since they are driven by the market, they say, "Well, what generates the biggest reaction?
Well, it's over here. Oh, well, I think I'll go over here and do that because, after all, I can do very well with that." And envy generates strife. The two things go hand in hand, like cheese and crackers, but but not as palatable. Indeed, it is unpalatable. One of the individuals is battered in an argument.
He is unwilling to acknowledge defeat, and as a result, bitter discord is the result. And there is a constant contradicting of the view of their rivals. And there are people like this always in the Christian Church. When you talk with them, there's always criticism. It's always argument.
It's always envy, and it's always strife. Indeed, one of the reasons that evangelicalism is in the predicament that it's in today is not as a result of the inroads of the world. Forget the world; the problem is in the church. It's decay from within. Speculation and commercialization and corruption and deceit and generating envy and strife, which is pervasive.
And with strife comes malicious talk, slander, scorn, insolence, insults and malicious innuendos and evil suspicions. Look at the list. The man who is jaundiced sees everything yellow. The mind of the envious is haunted by mistrust. This kind of individual begins to suspect every action, every word, every gesture of those to whom he is opposed, and as a result of it all, there is constant friction, a mutual irritant in the system, protracted quarrelling, persistent wrangling.
Says one of the commentators, when the mad novelty dispenser meets his opponent again to discuss other, quote, religious matters, he is vengefully nettled, convulsively agitated, thirsting for blood. Their religious discussions are actually disputations full of scurrilous abuse, stinging insult, and heated invective, or else. Covert insinuation, malicious innuendo, and thinly veiled disdain. Covert insinuation, malicious innuendo, and thinly veiled disdain. I don't want to alarm you, and I don't want to play.
Some kind of coward's castle, but I'm going to tell you something. You just described many a pastor's conference in the United States of America: covert insinuation, malicious innuendo, and thinly veiled disdain. How many do you have? What's the square footage of your building? Since when were those New Testament questions?
If that's the kind of stuff that the shepherds talk about when they're alone, it would be no surprise if the sheep decided that godliness actually is a means to financial gain. Let me say two things.
Now I want to wrap it up. Number one, this issue of strife and envy and everything, this will creep up and bite a church on its bottom when it isn't looking, and it may happen to us on any day. It may have begun to happen. Whenever a local congregation begins to sound to itself and then to others as if somehow or another it understands the Bible, you know, in a way that nobody understands the Bible, it understands doctrine in the only right way to understand it. It is the compendium of all revealed truth.
And every other pulpit, and every other place, and every other preacher, and every other group is somehow or another suspect. Then that congregation is in deep, deep difficulty. And to the degree that you or I feel that spirit of pride rising within us, we go right out there to the front door and squat down in front of the verse that's there in the marble—the only marble in the building, as far as I know. One piece put in there by the old polish man from forty-three. You have exalted above all things your name and your word.
We have only one string to our bow, one theme to our song. It's not about Parkside. It's not about us. It's about Him. And you see, when you move away from the sound instruction of the Lord Jesus Christ, then you inevitably start to talk about us rather than Him.
Said my old New Testament teacher, bless his memory, Donald Guthrie. True godliness must never be commercialized because it is a matter of the heart and not the pocket. The individuals Paul has described were, notice this, thirsty for applause, hungry for praise, and greedy for gain. Don't you like it when people clap when you do something well? You're not going to stand back from this and say, "Oh, I don't like applause." You play your violin, and they all go.
You go, "Hey, man, violin man, that's me." You make a sales presentation; they're wonderful. He said, "You know, if you're not careful, the guys that rise to the fore in this are driven." Like men walking in darkness, by the sound of clapping and the lure of applause, that's how it is that a guy loses his edge. Presumably, he starts off and he says, "I'm going to tell you what's in this book." Then suddenly, he stops telling people what's in the book. It's not that he does it one day and says, "I'm not going to tell you what's in this book anymore." He just starts to deviate ever so slightly. He just goes off ever so.
I don't want to say that it's a little hard. I don't want to mention that. There's a few people out there. I don't want to. No.
Before the congregation knows where it is, a deviation of one degree over twenty-seven miles has taken them way off the track. And they woke up one morning and said, "You know what? We're no longer on the freeway. We're not even on a B road. We're in Bypass Meadow here.
How did that happen? It happened not as a result of a major U-turn. It happened as a declension because an individual became enamored with applause, thirsty for praise, and greedy for gain." I don't want to hear anybody saying it couldn't happen here. I got an email the other Sunday night, came late Sunday night from one of my dear friends in Ireland. Said I just found your stuff on the internet and I wanted to know if you were still walking on the tracks.
And then he went in and described a few things. And then he said, "I have just come home from our monthly communion. We had forty people." But I am learning not to be concerned about the numbers, and you know it humbled me. It put me down, you know, in a good way, because I thought of him there, faithfully, faithfully, week after week, laboring with no immediate evidence of apparent success or influence. But the joy of the Lord is his strength.
These individuals that Paul is describing use numbers as their criteria for effectiveness. Epictetus records a conversation, and with this I close between a sophist and his disciple following the sophist's performance. It goes like this: Well, what did you think of me today? Incidentally, that's the first mistake. Never ask that question.
Don't ask your wife to answer that question for you. Not unless you're prepared to be humbled. That's not a New Testament question. What did you think of me today? He says, "What did you think of me today?" Upon my life, sir, I thought you were admirable.
What did you think of my best passage? Which one was that? Where I described Pan and the nymphs. Oh, it was excessively well done. A much larger audience today.
Yes, much larger. Five hundred, I should guess. Oh, nonsense! It could not have been less than a thousand. Why?
That is more than Dio ever had. I wonder why it was. They appreciated what I said too. Beauty, sir, can move a stone. See, I can tell you tall tales.
I can personally, with very little external help, see you laugh and see you cry. But I cannot teach the Bible and see you move one inch closer to conformity with Christ without the divine enabling of the Spirit of God, reminding me. To remind you that in an age of novelty, the main things are the plain things, and the plain things are the main things. You are listening to Truth for Life, where Alistair Begg is encouraging us to focus on what Scripture makes clear. He returns in just a moment.
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Now here's Aleister to close with prayer. O God, our Father. The word of God gives us no place to jump and hide. We find ourselves pressed in by its truth and its challenge. We look a few verses ahead and we realize it's about to get worse, because now it moves beyond the person in the position of teaching influence to the group and the crowd, and the temptation of being driven by the desire of financial gain.
So we pray that you would make us teach students of your word, conform us by your Spirit to the image of your Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Save us from the hypocrisy that likes to make people think that we're really quite diligent in relationship to these things—the kind of false piety that parades itself in the eyes of men. And isn't genuine in your sight, and so then sanctify us by your Spirit, that in both heart and in life we might serve you, and that we might do so acceptably to the honor of your great and holy name. Through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we pray. And may His grace and mercy and peace be our abiding portion today and forevermore.
Amen. Thanks for listening. Tomorrow we're going to learn the secret of contentment. I hope you can join us. The Bible teaching of Aleister beg is furnished by Truth for Life.
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