In this exposition of 1 Timothy 1:3-11, we explore the vital importance of sound doctrine and the spiritual dangers of allowing false teaching to take root within the church. Ultimately, true biblical instruction is designed not to stir up pointless debates, but to cultivate a genuine, Christ-like love that flows from a pure heart, a clean conscience, and a sincere faith.
Transcript
I’m going to read the text in just a moment. I’ll read what we read last week, beginning in verse one, but I’ll read through verse 11. And this morning we’ll be focusing on verses 3 to 11.
But before I read, let me remind you what we were looking at last week. The first chapter of 1 Timothy begins with the salutation, which we looked at last week. And then in verses 3 to 11, which we’re considering this morning, it’s a warning against false teachers and their misuse of the law. And in verses 12 to 17, Paul gives testimony concerning God’s abundant and rich grace. And then in 18 to 20, Paul’s charge to Timothy to fight the good fight.
So we looked at the purpose of the book, and we read last week as one of the markers, one of several key verses in the book which explains the heart and purpose of the book, is chapter 3 and verse 15.
“You will know how people ought to conduct themselves in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and foundation of the truth.”
So the book is about Paul’s instruction to Timothy regarding the church at Ephesus, in order to preserve the integrity of the gospel, establish sound doctrine, qualify leadership, and order the conduct of the household of God, the people of God. So this book is about how a church is to be organized. It is more than that, much more. It is about how we are to conduct ourselves before God, the very purpose of the church.
And as we see today, this book is about what makes a church healthy or what makes a church sick. Why do churches get sick and die?
- Some churches get sick and die because they dwindle and go away. That might not be the worst.
- Some churches flourish and become a completely dead church, like the churches in the book of Revelation when God says, “I will remove my candlestick from that church.” The church still functions, people gather there, maybe lots of people, and yet it is a dead church. It is a church that God does not recognize because it is not a true church of God any longer.
That’s a problem that we don’t want to see ever happen to Mayflower Hills Baptist Church. We want to know what it means to have a healthy church. We’re going to explore that this morning as we look at verses 3 through 11.
The Reading of the Word
So let me begin by reading this portion of scripture beginning in verse one, and then we’ll ask God to bless the study this morning. This is God’s holy inerrant word:
“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus according to the commandment of God our Savior, and of Christ Jesus, who is our hope, to Timothy, my true child in the faith: Grace, mercy and peace from God the Father and Christ Jesus our Lord. As I urged you upon my departure for Macedonia, remain on at Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines, nor to pay attention to myths and endless genealogies, which give rise to mere speculation rather than furthering the administration of God which is by faith. But the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. For some men, straying from these things, have turned aside to fruitless discussion, wanting to be teachers of the Law, even though they do not understand either what they are saying or the matters about which they make confident assertions. But we know that the Law is good, if one uses it lawfully, realizing the fact that law is not made for a righteous person, but for those who are lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers and immoral men and homosexuals and kidnappers and liars and perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound teaching, according to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, with which I have been entrusted.”
Father, we thank you so much for the glorious gospel that you entrusted to the Apostle Paul, and which has come to us so richly by the power of your Holy Spirit. Thank you, Father, for this passage of scripture and its clear instruction. Help us, Father, to be plain in speaking today. I pray, Father, that you would bless me so that I would not stray in any way from the truth, but Lord, that we’d be able to explain this passage clearly according to the truth that it represents. I ask, Father, for your special mercies in this way. Bless each one who hears your word today. May each of us be edified and built up in the faith. Where we need to be convicted, Father, convict us. And Lord, by the grace that comes through the power of your Holy Spirit, let us repent and turn to you. Help us, Father, in all the areas we need. We ask your grace and blessing in Christ’s name. Amen.
The Problem at Ephesus
As verse three gives us some background, following Paul’s release from his first Roman imprisonment, Timothy and Paul traveled together to Ephesus. And they found the church that Paul had established and taught years earlier in real trouble. There were false teachers, almost certainly these people held leadership positions in the church. And they were causing confusion and error and problems in the church. Before Paul left Ephesus, he excommunicated two of these, it tells us a little later in this chapter, Hymenaeus and Alexander, but he had to press on to Macedonia and the problem hadn’t been completely corrected.
So he left Timothy there at Ephesus. Timothy was to help shepherd this church. Timothy was to do exactly what it says in verse three, that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines. That was his purpose. And following that up from Macedonia, Paul writes this letter back to Timothy, which gives Timothy the authority in the church. This is a letter that would have been read in the church, it’s addressed specifically to Timothy, but it certainly would have been read in the church, and it gives Timothy the blueprint for taking the type of action so that this church’s sickness is corrected and that they are moved toward true health in Jesus Christ.
So we’re going to explore this a little bit. In verse three it says that Timothy was to remain in Ephesus so that you may instruct certain men not to teach strange doctrines. So the problem that was going on in Ephesus is that there were heretics in the church leading the church astray. The people in the church were being distracted by strange doctrines, by myths, the focus on Old Testament or various genealogies.
The Distraction of Genealogies and Myths
Genealogies was important in Judaism in the first century, because they had just returned from Babylon some hundreds of years earlier, and because of the destruction of the temple and because of some of the things that happened, some of the records were not as clear, and so establishing which tribe you belonged to became a very important thing in the Jewish circles just prior to the coming of Jesus Christ. And it was very important in Israel because the family you came from, if you could prove your heritage, then you had property. Your property was connected with your heritage. And so it was a very important thing and then you had status. If you came from certain tribes and certain heritages, you had more status than others.
And you’d think that it would have ended with the coming of Christ, but some of these Jewish traditions, some of the incredibly fanciful stories that was part of Jewish literature, the Midrash of Judaism, you read some of these things and it is incredibly fanciful, just like myths, and that’s what they used to create doctrine. They would go back to these stories. And so you have some of these people coming from a tradition similar to that carrying powerful influence in the church at Ephesus, and they were leading them astray. They were teaching them about the law as if they understood it, and they did so very confidently, but they were very wrong in what they taught, they didn’t understand at all.
Teaching Strange Doctrines
Paul calls that in verse one, not to teach strange doctrines. That’s an interesting word, because that phrase “strange doctrines” translates what is really a single word in Greek. It’s a word that Paul put together two words and formed one word out of it to coin a new word. And the word in Greek is heterodidaskalein, which means false teaching. You know what orthodox is, and what heterodox is.
- Orthodox means basically the root of the word orthodox means having a right opinion. If you go to the orthodontist, you get your teeth straightened. Orthodox means a straight or right opinion, a right thinking.
- Heterodox is its opposite. Heteros means other, other of a different kind.
So they were bringing in teaching that was different from the established teaching in the church. Paul had established there was an established teaching that had already been taught at the church at Ephesus and throughout the New Testament church that was the standard. And that teaching was the God-given instruction that the Lord had given to the apostles. God by the power of his Holy Spirit had given true teaching to the early church and they were departing from it. They were not following it.
The true teaching of the church in the Bible, the Bible calls it like in the book of Acts and places in the New Testament when it says “the faith”. When you read “the faith”, what do you think “the faith” means? When it’s used like that, “the faith”, it quite often means the content of the teaching of the church, the content of the true teaching of the church. That’s what we are to believe. The content of what we’re to believe is called “the faith”.
“Acts 14:22, strengthening the souls of the disciples, encouraging them to continue in the faith.”
The idea is to persevere in this doctrinal understanding. Some churches were being strengthened in the faith and were increasing in number daily. It doesn’t mean that they’re growing in their belief. Christian faith is very different than what the world thinks of as faith. It is not at all like that silly children’s Christmas movie Polar Express. “Just believe.” It’s a pretty dark movie, I was talking about that with someone this week. It’s a kind of a strange movie. But anyway, the point of the movie is just believe. Now what do you believe? Well, probably Santa Claus, but even that’s not clear in the movie. The thing is, if you believe, then you’re going to be good. You’ve got to have faith. Whatever your faith is in, it’s good, just have faith.
That’s not Christianity at all. Not at all. The Christian faith has content. There’s something that you believe, there’s a person that you believe. And the content of the Christian faith is the teaching of the church, it is the gospel message and the truth of God’s word. And believing the gospel message and the truth of God’s word, if you believe the word of God, then you’re putting your trust in God as well, you believe God. And so you can’t just have faith, your faith has to be vested in truth for it to be any good at all.
The Necessity of Sound Doctrine
A lot of people hate doctrinal teaching. They don’t want you to teach doctrine. They think that doctrine means that you’re going to be rigid or inflexible, and maybe somewhat true. They think that doctrine is impractical. And almost all of them think that doctrine is really boring. But what they’re looking for instead of doctrine is a religious experience of some kind, or a feeling of spiritual fervor. And spiritual fervor is great, it’s a good thing. But it’s pointless if it’s not a result of God’s truth.
God’s truth is the foundation. We have to be stirred up, our emotions should be stirred up by our encounter with the Lord through his word. But just having our emotions stirred up, which isn’t hard to do, I can tell stories that affect our emotions and not touch on the word of God. One preacher told a story about a couple in his church who had just moved into a new house, and the house had a fireplace, and they decided to try it out. Unfortunately, the fireplace was actually set up for gas logs that hadn’t been installed. They decided to try out the fireplace, so they built a nice fire in the fireplace, which had a wood floor, there were no bricks under there. So what happened is that the fire built up, it burned through the floor, and it fell into the basement. Not a lot of point, and a lot of fervor without a foundation. You have to have substance. If there is substance, it’s quite a different thing.
So people don’t like doctrinal teaching. I’m here to convince you that it is absolutely necessary for the health of a church. What is doctrine, by the way? What is it? Doctrine is the teaching of the word of God made clear. That’s all it is. Doctrine is the teaching of God’s word made clear. And you find it by comparing one scripture with another, by taking the scripture in its context. There are many ways to find doctrinal truth in God’s word, but there is solid teaching that is consistent throughout the word of God. We call that doctrine.
What you have in verse three is that men have come into the church who are teaching false doctrine. False teaching is a spiritual disease that arises within a church. It can cause all kinds of havoc in a church. It causes the church to become diseased spiritually, and move away from God.
Understanding “Sound” Doctrine
Look at verse ten. At the end of this section where Paul is saying the true purpose of the law is for the lawless, not for people who are living according to faith, but according to the lawless, and he gives this long list of the immoral men and the kidnappers and liars and perjurers. And whatever else is contrary to sound teaching. Whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. These people are living their life that way.
I wanted to focus on that phrase “sound doctrine”. Because of that word “sound”. I want us to think about it. What does the word “sound” mean? If you’re talking about truth or logic, for example, what is a sound argument in logic? Well, in logic, you can have a valid argument where the argument flows logically, it’s perfectly logical, and it not be sound. You take the premises of the argument, and if they are true, then what follows is true, because the logic is perfect. But the premises might be false. In which case, the whole thing is false. A sound argument in logic is an argument that flows logically and the premises are true. It’s all true.
And so it’s interesting, this word sound, because we also use sound in a different way. We talk about a sound body. What does a sound body mean? It means that you’re healthy. You’ve got good health. Everything is working right and in its proper place and you have good health. And so that was what’s interesting to me is that this word, when you’re talking about sound teaching, sound doctrine, the Greek word used here is hugiainō. That’s the participle, it’s a little harder to say than the root word which is hugiēs. That word is where we get our word hygiene. And it literally means being healthy. Healthy, wholesome teaching. So his point is that sin is a form of spiritual sickness, and it arises often because of a false understanding of God’s word. If you have a false understanding of God’s word, you’ve got a real problem.
To underscore this so that you know this is a major point in this book, Paul at the very end of the book in chapter six verse three, he says this, if anyone advocates a different doctrine, and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness. It’s the same idea, same word. The sound doctrines, teachings, sound words. What is he talking about? He’s saying, you want to know what makes a church healthy? Right teaching makes the church healthy. It makes a whole church, it makes a church healthy. It doesn’t necessarily make every individual in the church healthy, unfortunately, but it does make a church healthy. It’s foundational. It’s good food for the soul. Doctrinal teaching feeds our souls. A correct understanding of God’s word feeds our souls.
The Danger from Within
And when a heretic comes into the church, Jesus called them wolves in sheep’s clothing. The church has many problems. You have outsiders who oppose the church, like the vocal atheists who teach atheism and attack the church in various ways, or people who persecute the church from the outside, to make it difficult for the church worldwide. But the real danger in the church is when someone comes inside the church and acts as if they’re one of you, and then they have a different agenda. They teach an alien doctrine. That’s the real danger of a church. That’s the serious problem. That’s the problem that this church faced.
Martin Luther said that false teachers devour the dead. What he meant was like an unbeliever in a church. You have people in every church, there are people who are believers and some generally who are not believers. And when they get caught up in false teaching, it’s like it closes the door of hope to them. It seals them in that state until they die. And so he called that devouring the dead, teaching deceitfully, flattering, pleasing doctrines that cause a person to trust themselves and their own efforts, for example, rather than trust the righteousness of God.
So you have that kind of problems that we face in the church today. Legalism comes into the church, and it teaches you to do all these rules and things, and if you obey this and do this and don’t do that, then you can be sanctified and you’re good before God. And then there are those who do the opposite, and say God loves you with a great love and you don’t have to worry about anything, you can believe pretty much anything you want, just make sure you get along. And if you get along, you’re all good. That’s the way a lot of liberal teaching goes today.
The Goal of True Instruction
So the purpose of sound teaching is for us to become healthy in Jesus Christ. These teachers were teaching myths, I’d like to go into the myths, but I clearly don’t have time. Some of the things that they taught, you can get a lot of those today. There’s all sorts of strange teaching from Old Testament passages and New Testament passages that people twist and add to, they have novel doctrines, it’s really interesting, you find a novel teaching and that can attract a lot of people. Get caught up in all kinds of details with all kinds of controversies. And all those things, all that discussion, all that talk makes these people look like they know something. They stand out, people look up to them. And that’s what it’s about. It’s about their own pride and winning an audience and all those things. You can find plenty of those online today. And the goal is gaining their audience.
What is the goal of Paul’s teaching? What is the goal of Paul’s ministry? We read that in verse five.
“The goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith.”
What does healthy doctrine produce in a church? It causes the people in the church to love with a true Christian love. A love like Christ’s love. A love that is sacrificial and not selfish. A true doctrine feeds the soul, and when we respond to that doctrine in faith, and don’t reject it, then it works in our heart, it changes us. It produces a genuine love that flows from the inside out. How does it flow? It has three sources.
A Pure Heart
Godly love, Christ-like love, flows out of the heart of a person out of a pure heart. You know the heart in scripture represents the inner person. We think of a beating heart, but in the New Testament the idea of the heart is the center of a person, the inner person, your thinking and feeling self. The center of your spiritual life. It has to do with your thinking and your reason and your motives and your feelings and your attitudes, all of that is your core.
But it’s not just your heart. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. It doesn’t just flow naturally from a person’s heart. It flows from a pure heart. From a cleansed heart. It flows from a heart that has been washed by regeneration, by the Holy Spirit through regeneration. You’ve been given new life, you’ve been given a new heart. The pure heart is marked by your devotion to the Lord. And because it’s been cleansed, a pure heart seeks to please and serve other people, just like Christ did sacrificially. You love God and you serve other people. That’s the active Christian love.
And you can’t produce it yourself. You can’t say, I see these defects in my heart, but I’m going to turn over a new leaf, I’m going to fix this problem that I have. I’m just going to do it by sheer willpower. No matter what you do to your heart in that way, it’s going to be your effort through your sinful imperfections. And it can never work. No, a pure heart must come from God himself. Remember David’s sin with Bathsheba, and his prayer in Psalm 51, when he repented, he turns to the Lord and he says, create in me a pure heart, O God. Create in me a pure heart. The word create in that passage, bara, is the very same word that you find in Genesis 1:1, God created. It’s the work of God to create a pure heart to cleanse you. It’s the work that comes to us through the work and ministry of Jesus Christ. A pure heart can’t be fashioned or patched together by our existing human traits, because our own sinful nature would keep it impure. It has to be miraculous, a brand new creation that only God can do, and he works that work out of nothing, just like he created creation out of nothing, he creates a pure heart in us. And it has pure motives.
The proof of a healthy doctrine is that this kind of love is linked to the doctrinal teaching that we’re receiving. If in the church you have teaching, that teaching should lead us to love God more, and to love each other more, and to serve each other more. That’s why I have to say, when the truth is taught, it doesn’t necessarily have that reaction with every individual, because it can be rejected. But the truth in a church with God’s people generally has that effect of leading us more and more into love.
For example, the five sermons I just did on prayer, that was very simple teaching. It was doctrinal teaching. It was God’s word and the doctrine that God has to say about prayer. It was just a little bit of it. Is it received? How is it received? Does it encourage us to love the Lord more and pray more? Or did we get it at all? You see, we respond to it in faith. The Holy Spirit stirs our heart with the truth, and we respond to it, and it affects us in some way. We can, if we have a problem with any doctrinal teaching, no matter what it is, it convicts us, we have a choice to make.
A Good Conscience
That’s the second part of this. A good conscience which is our moral compass. If you hear the word of God and the word of God stirs your conscience, you have a guilty conscience. You don’t have a good conscience. Your conscience is not perfect, it stirs you up and you feel uncomfortable.
One of two things is going to happen. You’re either going to see your need to turn from that pattern of thinking or that sin and come back to Christ where you find peace and love and every good thing. Or you’ll reject that truth. You will dig down deeper and you’ll have that uncomfortable feeling you’ll have a bad conscience and that bad conscience does exactly the opposite. If you have a bad conscience and you do not repent that means it’s going to put up a petition a wall between you and everybody else between you and God.
And so you have a choice to make. Are you going to follow the Lord in this truth? Are you going to reject it and go your own selfish prideful way which will lead to guilt feelings and when you get around people that make you feel guilty you don’t like that you tend to avoid those people. You see it causes the opposite to happen that causes the division. The conscience is a moral compass.
What happens when you continue in that? Well you become exactly like Paul’s description of these heretics who are teaching strange doctrine. Their conscience is seared. It’s another kind of medical term. The idea of being burned and the scar tissue builds up and you can’t feel anything at all any longer. A right conscience, a good conscience where you have been made right with the Lord, we sin all the time but we come to the Lord in repentance and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin and so we have a clean conscience. And we feel right before the Lord. That’s joy. There’s a lot of joy in that.
A Sincere Faith
And from a sincere faith that means you’re not hypocritical. You’re not pretending but a true trust in God. If you truly trust in the Lord then that removes your selfishness. A hypocrite can’t love anybody more than he loves himself. So the hypocrite is primarily concerned with putting on a show and displaying something wonderful so that people think well of him and what he is really worrying about and thinking about is what people think of him. But Christianity requires a selflessness and that can only be fueled by genuine trust in God and in his word.
We hear the word of God the doctrine we’re instructed by it we put our trust in God in the word of God and that leads to a right relationship with God. It leads to these three things that Paul says this is what good teaching produces. Good teaching, the fruit of good teaching is a pure heart, a good conscience and a sincere faith.
These men strayed from that. They wanted to become teachers of the law and so they insisted and taught things that Paul says that they taught as if they had great authority these things that they didn’t understand at all. They’re absolutely confident in their preaching. Their preaching isn’t timid. They’re extremely confident. They are telling people in such a way that people naturally believe them. But they don’t have a clue of what the meaning of what they’re about.
Conclusion and Prayer
I think I’m going to stop because I’m not sure I’m doing a good enough job with what I’ve got but we’ve got a section to come to about the purpose of the law. So I think I’m going to take the purpose of the law and we’ll look at that next week. The purpose of the law is to expose our sinful heart just to summarize this we’ll look at it next week. But it’s not made for the righteous, the person who is living by faith according to the word of God he doesn’t have to worry about the law. But it exposes people who are sinful, the profane, the murderers, the immoral men and homosexuals those who kidnap. We’ll look at this section next week and we’ll seek God’s blessing in understanding this better next week. It’ll give me time to deal with that more thoroughly.
Let me pray for us and we’ll close the service in prayer. Father we thank you again for this beautiful passage. It truly is beautiful Father whatever this sermon however my failure is to communicate this Lord I sense a lot of opposition spiritually. Whatever my failure is to communicate this today I thank you Father for the purity of your holy word and this excellent teaching. I thank you Father that you have given us a wonderful pattern for our church and instruction that is so vital. Father it’s important for us to know that true doctrine, true teaching of God’s word leads to spiritual health. It leads to us to be corrected in the inner man. Father every one of us needs to ask ourselves with the things that we are hearing is it making a difference? Are we walking what we talk about? Are we walking our talk? Are we living out the life that you would have us live that you’ve clearly taught us in your word is it making that kind of a difference? And Father I pray that you help us to put ourselves on guard against false teaching it’s so much of it around us. It fills our pulpits, it’s taught in seminaries and Bible colleges and sometimes people take those important sheepskins that they have received and that becomes a tool of deceit to pass them off as true shepherds in a church. Father guard us against such things. When error comes into the church it leads to spiritual sickness. Keep us in your holy truth. Help us Father to read your word to be like the Bereans to question the teaching to understand it to come to a true understanding of what you teach. And Father may none of us fall into the pattern of these heretics who seek glory and who lead people into a terrible sinful state. Help us Lord help us to love your teaching to love your word and to be changed through it. We ask your great blessing. We need the power of your spirit to change us. We ask your great blessing to the glory of our Savior the Lord Jesus. Amen.
