First Timothy, lesson 19 question 2

All right, so let's pick up with where we left off there. We covered question two of lesson 19 last time. We're in 1 Timothy chapter four. We've kind of turned the corner here into chapter four. We're looking at verses one through three. And Okay, sorry, we're looking at verses one through three of chapter four, and we talked about, we talked about question one and two last time, so let's reread those verses, and just to refresh ourselves here.

But the Spirit explicitly says that in latter times, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons, by means of the hypocrisy of liars, seared in their own conscience as with a branding iron. Men who forbid marriage and advocate abstaining from foods which God has created to be gratefully shared in by those who believe and know the truths. For everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with gratitude, for it is sanctified by means of the word of God and prayer.

And so we've been in, yeah, Verse one all of last week and we'll see if we get beyond verse one this week. There's a lot in there Um kind of just a quick recap. We sort of pointed out last week that um chapter three paul has been talking about the qualifications for church leadership and now he's turning to look at uh certain I don't know how else to say it, kind of person who would love to take a position of leadership in the local church that we need to be wary of. And what we also want to notice in this passage is that there's not just a human agenda here, there's a satanic or demonic agenda going on here. Satan's intelligent, very intelligent. He knows how to inflict the most possible damage in the local church.

And really all he has to do is give us the kind of leadership that we naturally gravitate towards anyway. So what kind of leadership do we gravitate towards in our flesh, let's say? We have this natural tendency to want to earn a little bit of merit, to produce a little bit of our own righteousness, or maybe a lot. And so these teachers that come in, they promote a works-based Christianity. And they're actually really popular, because this is kind of what we gravitate towards.

But Paul doesn't sugarcoat this. He calls it exactly what it is. He calls it the doctrine of demons. Um, and, uh, you know, and these are the kinds of leaders and teachers that we need to be aware of in the church. They're everywhere. They're really common. Um, I, I read a Lutheran pastor, um, from our local town here this last week that said, you know, what this world needs is more kindness and decency. And that kind of talk really sells. People like that. They eat that up with a spoon. Let's not talk about Jesus or the cross. Let's just be kind to others. And that's, frankly, the doctrine of demons.

That is exactly the kind of thing Paul's talking about here. So Paul's warning about this, we talked about that last time, we'll talk about it more today as we get into who these teachers are and so forth, but we also talked about the fact that this falling away from the faith takes place in the latter times, or the latter days, however you translate it. And we just talked about when is that? When does that exist?

And we said that this really refers to the time between the first coming of Christ and his second coming. All of that in the New Testament is sort of referred to as the latter times. And I came across another reference this week that's helpful in that regard. First Peter, chapter 1 verse 20 1 Peter 1, verse 20, he says, for he was foreknown, talking about Jesus, before the foundation of the world, but has appeared in these last times for the sake of you.

So we are, we could say, in the last times. But with that in mind, we've been in the last times for almost 2,000 years now, right? Or a little, you know, about approximately. So we are in the church age is really the final. phase of history before the rapture, the seventies week of Daniel, and Christ's second coming.

And so we're in this age, and during this, the church age, we can see that the church is going to be characterized or plagued with this continual falling away that Paul's talking about here. So that sets us up for question three. Unless anyone's got any other comments on the review? I always, I can spend half of a class on a review if I'm not careful, so. But this sets us up for question three. Question three says, who are the ones who fall away? So we talked about this falling away that's kind of just prevalent throughout the whole church age. And we'll talk about what the falling away is next. But who are the ones who fall away?

Just straight out of the text, what does it tell you? It's maybe, I mean, just kind of read it and see if you can kind of give me like a, the ones who fall away are the ones who are doing what? following yeah okay yeah so what translation so what is your uh following after how to say that read your read your verse one there mine says the same um okay yeah okay so yeah okay jump apart from the faith is what mine says Show the part of the faith.

Paying attention to. Paying attention to, okay. Yeah, I kind of keyed in on that word, paying attention to there. And so it's interesting, the ones who fall away are the ones who are paying attention to. Yeah, verse one says, in my new king, or the new King James, or whatever. Giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. Okay, so giving heed. Paying attention. And those words, those phrases there, are translating the Greek word prosekko. And it's an interesting word. It means to hold the mind or the ear toward someone. So, you know, focus your attention on them, right?

Miles, I think all of these are that they've taken their focus off the Lord. Every one of them is a focus away from the Lord, you know, paying attention to the doctrine by means of hypocrisy. Their eyes are not on the Lord. They have somehow gotten their eye off the Lord, and now following, as Donna said, or they're paying attention to, but the focus has gone off the Lord. And that will take you to doctrine of demons, you know, men who forbid marriage, and abstaining from food, all these other distractions, works-based, law-based, everything. It's just that the focus has taken off the Lord.

Things like all of these. Well, yeah, the thing is, is you get it. It's like you have to learn self before you can learn the Lord. You have to know the deceitfulness. Well, you have to know in the flesh, but but I think this is they're being they're being drawn away because their focus has gone off. You know, the Lord is the focus. I don't know, lost of mind, but they're just paying attention to following. It's like in James when your eye gets focused on something and the slide down into sinning.

That's the deceitfulness of sin. Yeah. But again, it's being drawn away from the Lord. Anything that draws you away from the Lord has the ability to draw you into any of these areas. Well, and I was looking too, that sum, that's an interesting Greek. Yeah.

The only thing that sets free is correct doctrine. Well, and Mike, I think you've, that's, and Courtney, you're both saying the same thing there, that God's Word is the doctrine. It's the truth. The focus is there, not on the doctrine of deception. And so what you see, and when you look around, you see, I call it religion going off, which is perpetrated by these demons of deception. And what's interesting is that it's based on performance, not faith.

Yeah. Without exchanging the truth for a lie. Yeah. Yeah. And it's because, I think, in a lot of cases, you don't know the truth very well. Right. Because you haven't been taught it. Right. And so you're an easy victim. Yeah. So, yeah, like I said, we naturally gravitate towards exactly what these exactly what the doctrine of demons dishes out, right? Yeah, we love, we love works based systems, we love earning merit or favor, that's just what we want to do. And so it's very, very easy actually to come in and, and, you know, Just teach this do-goodism, you know, whatever. It takes on a thousand different flavors.

You know? When you say, when you say, we mouse, that's the flesh. That is the flesh. Yeah. The flesh will gravitate to this every time. Yeah, we in our carnal nature, you know how this flesh, the desire towards towards earning favor. Let me illustrate a little bit this word, Prosecco, this paying attention to. I don't know how many of you guys have spent time on a tractor doing field work. Not a lot. Yeah, OK.

So if you drive by some of the fields these days, you'll see that the rows, the croc rows, are like laser straight, just exactly precise. And that's because tractors are guided by a GPS system today. And so those rows will be extremely precise. But not so long ago, there was no GPS system. So farmers had to set those rows as straight as they could manually. So what's the best way to do that? Any engineers in the class that could tell us how to make a straight line? So what they would often do is pick an object on the far side of the field. not something right close to you, something far away that's kind of in the direction you want to go, and you just set your eyes on that and head straight towards that thing. And that's great. It works pretty well.

The difficult thing is at night, you have very little visibility, but thankfully, You know, out on the prairies, you can see a light from 10 miles away, you know, or more. And so you have all these little farms with their yard lights dotted around the horizon. And I was listening to a speaker one time, he was also a farmer, he was talking about his experience at night. He found that light out there on the horizon.

And he started to follow it. And this was a field that was right along the highway. He wanted to make sure this row was real straight so everybody driving by could see what a, you know, careful job he did of planting this field. And, you know, as he got going, and I don't know how long it took, eventually, he realized something's wrong here. This just isn't right. And the light that he set his eyes on were the headlights of a car that was traveling down the road. And so you can imagine what happened to his nice straight rope, right? But that's exactly the picture that Paul is painting here with this idea of paying attention to or fixing our eyes on.

In fact, this term, prosecco, was used in terms of holding a ship on course, like in a certain direction. And the same kind of thing. You've got to navigate a ship. according to something fixed. And so that's why navigators will use the stars, because that's distant and fixed in terms of their movements. Or an object on the shoreline.

If you've ever been on a boat, you look at the water, you think you're going one way, and you look up the shore, and you realize you're drifting another direction altogether. And so you've got to fix your eyes on something in order to navigate by, but we can also fix our eyes on the wrong things, right? If we fix our eyes on a deception, then we're going the wrong way, right? And we may not even realize it because honestly, you know, it wouldn't be a deception if it didn't look right.

That's the really important thing to realize. We often talk about deception. That was a Charlie Kluft thing, JD, from years ago. He said something about, I think it goes like this, the insidious nature of deception is that it implies our total unawareness of it. And it does. You don't know you're deceived until you find out that you are.

But that's what's going on, right? So are these believers? Yes. Yeah. And do they get and it's not but it doesn't have to do with salvation. Correct. Correct. No. Good point. Good point. Yeah. And in answer to his question, who are the ones who fall away? You know, this is talking about believers, but you're right. It's not talking about falling away in terms of eternal salvation. But let's get into that. That's question number four. What do they fall away from? So, unless there's any other thoughts on question three, but let's, we moved into that naturally, so. Yeah.

I think they fall away from their walk with the Lord. paying attention to this deceitfulness that is presenting itself to be more attractive, and so rather than care about who they have trusted in the past, they start to think about works. And it could be as simple as that, right? I've got to do something, even if I'm in the church. I could get focused not on the Lord Jesus, but on the performance and my small group. And you completely start to lose sight Now this doctrine of demons sounds pretty intense.

And it's by means of the hypocrisy of liars. And I mean, it even goes on seared in their own conscious as with a branding iron. So this falling away is not just like Casual I'm not walking with the Lord. This is something that I Mean is the branding iron it goes a bit deeper in my opinion Mm-hmm.

And yeah, and then it goes on in verse 3 to explain what that looks like We had those connections. Yeah All right, I mean, how do you, yeah, how do you get from, you know, point A to point B here? How do you go from, you know, this, really what I think is described at the end of chapter three, we talked about that last time, this focus on the Lord Jesus, who he is, and what he has done, and now all of a sudden we're into the forbidding of marriage and abstaining from foods. How do we go from that point A to point B, right? How do we fall away So and you know, the word there, fall away, or is literally depart a fist to me, which which just means it often is used just departing physically leaving some physical location. You know, so this is a departure, we departed from something. And we're, you know, now, going somewhere else altogether. Um, And so what is that?

And keeping in mind, this is as believers, as those who are, you know, justified born again. Miles, one of the things, kind of, come back up to 30,000 feet. Remember, this is one whole letter. We divide it up into chapters. So we've gone through and he's now explained how to set up leadership, you know, elders, deacons, we've gotten all that. This is kind of a subset that says, you know, the reason why these qualifications, all this. And then he gets into this where the body can be pulled away in so many different ways. Doctrines of demons, all these different things. You get into all these law-based things. And then we're saying who it is.

We get back in, not that I want to get ahead, but in verse 6, in pointing out these things to the brethren. So it's a subset to that, you know, you've laid out the leadership, here's the danger, and then he gets back into ministering. And so this, the reason why you put in good leadership is to avoid this subset, you know, to avoid this, yeah, one through five, basically, is, you know, you You're going to have people who are going to fall away. Be aware of this, leaders. Stick to the word. And the last part of three where it's pointing out the Lord. Like I said, keep the focus on the Lord. This will happen. And then it gets back to including pointing these things out to brethren. Yeah, no, that's good. I think that's a really good big picture view of this for sure.

And so what is the faith? here because it says we'll fall away from the faith and that is the definite article there the word the is is in the greek this is the faith um not just faith yeah um can can i just interrupt here because i'm reading in zodiac and what he says here he says the same is true in first timothy 4-1 in which the word is translated as fall away The word expresses standing alone in contrast to pistuo, to believe. This does not refer to those who had at one time been believers, but to those who refuse to believe, who stand aloof and alone. Okay. Yeah, it would sound to me that like he's trying to like he's taking this as a, he's trying to protect against the idea of losing your salvation against loss of salvation. I don't, I wouldn't take it that way.

Because I think we can depart from the faith without losing salvation if we understand what the faith is what the content of the faith yeah does that make sense donna i mean yeah i know i think i if i understand what he's saying there right yeah um obvious obviously yeah sorry go ahead yeah well he makes it sound like it like they never were believers right right yeah jd do you have something on i'm just saying that's a very reformed conclusion uh... when i i i i i think you can analyze that too if you depart from that means you started in the faith you can't depart from something you didn't have yeah i don't know i mean i'm not a greek scholar to you know to identify between standing aloof and departing from but i mean if you look at the word as is used in the new testament it it almost always just talks about leaving from one place and going to another.

So I think the most straightforward interpretation is that These are people who were of the faith and are, or had, you know, were, well, we gotta talk about what the faith is here to make this clear. But, you know, because often, unfortunately, we talk about the faith, you know, as being Christianity or something like that, the faith. And so if you're of the faith, that means you're a Christian. If you're not of the faith, that means you're not. And that's not really what the word means.

I mean, You know, by faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross, we are new creations. We are born anew in Christ Jesus. That's an unchangeable fact. But there's also this reality of walking walking by faith, right? And the faith talks about the specific content, the objective content of our faith. And that is what? As Christians, we have more in terms of our the doctrine that our faith is to be in as believers, right? I mean, people have been justified born-again believers all the way down since Genesis 3, but with the beginning of the Church, there is specific doctrine that is critical for our life and walk as believers.

And what is that? How would you summarize that core content will be sometimes call, um, you know, identification truths or, um, that kind of thing. What is the content? Yeah, go ahead. If you were going to put a label on it, I would call it Pauline truth. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he was, he was, yeah, specifically. Yeah.

You know, you can criticize me if you want, but we have a guy in our fellowship that this has happened to, and he sits in a retirement home now and wonders whether he lost the spirit of God or not. And so he has been deceived. There's no question about that, because he won't, for some reason, he won't respond to all those that care about him and go see him and talk to him. He doesn't want to hear it. He's deceived. And so is the guy saved? I definitely think he is. There's too much evidence that he is. But look where he is today.

So you can be, as a believer, you can be deceived. You can start listening to these deceiver spirits, and the next thing you know, you're out on a limb someplace, and it starts to change your whole idea of what it means to be just resting by faith in the person and work of Christ. I've gone from that to how I feel about it, or changing and putting my faith in some false leader or some pop Christian song that happens to come through the community about two or three times a year. It says by means of hypocrisy of liars. Yeah. Yeah. So there has to be this exchanging the truth for a lie.

Well, when you go through all of the requirements to be a leader, you assume that that person wants they're commissioned to be a leader, that they're diligent in study and are tracking on the word and passing on that information and encouraging a sheep to grow. But that doesn't mean that the sheep are, you know, they're out in the field by themselves sometimes and you're not around. And, you know, they have a electronic means to listen to somebody else and here is an idea that's implanted in them by a deceiver. I'm just envisioning here sheep tuning into the radio.

But you're right, Mike. Those hypocrites, as Paul calls them here, we'll just use his terminology. We're not name-calling, we're just using the Bible. These hypocritical liars are all over. Like I said, they're very popular. They're very fun to listen to, honestly, because they grab our attention. They're charismatic. They're eloquent. They're great delivery.

But they'll turn you away from, like you said, Mike, resting by faith in the person and work of Christ towards just about anything else, whether it's work or whether it's feelings. The easiest way to do it is to somehow convince you that that your rest is based on your efforts. And that you have to, you need to kick up your game a little bit so that you're more pleasing to the Lord. And that's what Reformed theology does. It sucks you into, I've got to perform. I've got to get myself, I've got to check out these laws and make sure I'm abiding by them.

I go back also to the power of the flesh. The flesh has no greater desire than to fall into this deception. As Mike says, trying to identify the flesh is a hard thing to do, and a lot of the hungry hearts, the hardest thing is to see how sinful your flesh is. The Romans 7, there's nothing good in my flesh. And the flesh gravitates to this, and the world is very subtle in its reform or anything.

It's where that the flesh feels satisfied in doing something. And it's by any kind of program or anything that draws you away, again, from the focus on the Lord and grace, and it can be subtle, it can be a sledgehammer, it can be anything, but it's to satisfy the flesh is what draws people to this point. Yep.

JD, you had a comment? Well, I was just wondering if the class could kind of identify something outside of Reformed Theology. Towards the end of that comment, Courtney, you mentioned anything. But what are some other typical things that we might be drawn away with? Because we pick on Reformed Theology a lot, and I get it, because it's law-based, right? I wouldn't say, yeah, that's why I tried to get away from early reform.

Look at how many churches, I look at some of the Brethren churches around here now, focus on current events or the feelings or some topical whatever. And the subtlety of it is there. We're putting a Christian tint on it, but it's still kind of not focusing on the Lord. It's focusing on worldly things or a feeling. It's all in show and this and that.

It's not in getting into God's word and focusing on the Lord. And so there are a lot of churches that are like that, not just Reformed. They're not into studying God's Word. Yeah, if they're not focused on the identification truths, then they fall into this other category.

And that can range all the way from the legal reformed kind of thing all the way to the charismatic feelings-based type of thing. But it's the same. They're still in the same paradigm. It's all human-focused, either what I do or how I feel or whatever. It's all me-focused, though.

You remember the pendulum? Yeah. that's right i mean you know i know it's funny so it's a pendulum jd's talking about it on those years ago right you know legalism and licentiousness kind of thing that is pendulum and one of the things that just i really uh... i've seen so much as the people think okay we got legalism way over here we got licentiousness way over here and we just want to find the middle well everybody thinks they're in the middle everybody thinks they've got the right balance but the the thing that we have to come to understand is that we're off the pendulum. We're not on the pendulum of legalism and licentiousness.

We exist in something totally different, and that's what grace is. But the entire church in terms of churchianity, Christendom, exists somewhere on that pendulum, that swing between works and not works and grace, but between legalism and licentiousness. Right? Because even licentiousness exists in that same realm of works. People think that that's kind of the, you know, they get confused about that because we make the law grace distinction and people think we're talking about the legal licentious distinction and they're identifying grace with licentiousness and that's just not true. That's not the case. you know, we're completely off of that whole spectrum, where all of religion in terms of, you know, religion, you know, worldly man centered religion exists somewhere in that, that kind of spectrum.

Does that sort of make sense? You kind of got on the one hand, legal works based on the other hand, you've got, you know, feelings based where it doesn't matter what you do, just so long as you know, you feel close to the Lord, we're going to stimulate emotions and that kind of thing.

It's all Yeah. It's all the doctrine of demons. It's all completely ignoring... It's not grace. It's not grace. None of that is good. No, it's not grace, because if you had to whip up emotional feelings to have assurance, you know, to feel close to God, then you've missed it, because we don't... it's not about how close to God we feel, it's about the fact that His Word tells us we are... we are placed in his son by grace. And so we're totally accepted in Christ Jesus. We share the same kind of acceptance that he has, which is, and that's grace, so.

So would you say the problem is understanding the doctrine of justification and not really coming to peace with God? I think it's probably more so the problem of not understanding the doctrine of identification. Because there's a lot of people that will talk about justification, right? Saved by grace alone, through faith alone, they understand that, but they fail to ever move beyond the fact that Christ died for me to the fact that I was crucified with Christ.

Because that is the truth, that's our identification. You know, we have to be counting on, that's how the Christian life is lived, right? That's the real Christian life is Christ's life in me, our crucifixion death and our resurrection life in Christ. As soon as you step away from that, go ahead.

Miles, I remember when I first started here and Mike was teaching grace and there were several other guys in the class or in the, I think it was a Tuesday class or whatever, and talked about grace. And I just remember several of them were so, Well, several were, you know, you just sit in a room and do nothing, you got to go out and do things.

And they didn't understand kind of how grace, you know, you don't work to do grace, works come out of grace. And they didn't understand that. And it was like, well, you know, grace, you got to do something. Grace, what do you mean? You just sit in a room and you just do nothing? And it's just looking at it backwards. You work with grace now. Work comes out of grace.

It's in a sense, you have to get to the end of that Roman seven experience to where you say, you know, I want to do like, it's all fine and good that they say, well, I want to do good work. I want to do something. There's still in that Roman seven path that Paul describes, you know, the very thing you got to come to the point where you realize the thing I want to do, I can't. And you got to come to a point of trying out who, who will save me from the body of this death. And it's, it's going to have to be someone else living through me. because I can't, you know, I can't do it. So, but that's a very natural response when someone is still stuck in that Roman seven place.

And we all have a tendency toward that, right? We all gravitate toward that. I do think though, you know, our job as teachers is to establish people in what this verse calls the faith. Because if you get established in it and you settle down and you know the parameters, the probability of your being fooled is minimal. Minimize. Minimize. Minimize.

Well, again, that goes back to how this letter is laid out. It's the teachers have to be qualified. The teachers have to be focused. That's what I was saying. If you go back from 30,000 feet and look at this and look at the letter, qualified leaders will prevent these from being drawn away.

And then it gets back in verse 6. Well, in ministry, let's move on. We're going to talk about this really soon, but verse 6. the leader in pointing out these things, just like we're doing right here, you'll be a good servant of Christ Jesus and nourished in the faith. So pointing out the possibility of apostasy and how it looks and how it works, all of this is kind of the crescendo, at least in my mind, is how the leader functions to help the brethren.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, at this rate, we'll be in verse six in about three months. So but the good news is I'm gone next week. I'm in the other class. So Mike's going to take over. So then we'll just be cruising right along. But no, this is this has been a really good study.

I got a one parting thought on that that I wanted to make clear is that, you know, this falling away from the faith, if this meant leaving Churchianity then the churches would be empty. But the reality is that people can be Give church members and have fallen away from the faith because to fall away from the faith means to fall away from grace Fall fall away from from walking by by faith in his grace. This is really the Galatians. They still went to church Right, but they had begun by the spirit and they are now attempting to live the Christian life by works of the flesh. So Again, the legal flavor, but yeah, that's, well, some really, really good thoughts. I really appreciate everybody's input this morning. Really good material to be covering. Let's close in prayer there.

Heavenly Father, we thank you so much. for the grace that we live under. Lord, we thank you that the Christian life is not a life for us to live, it's the life that you intend to live through us. And Lord, we just are, oh boy, it takes us so long to come to understand that, and we get it mixed up so much and just so naturally. gravitating back towards this false doctrine of thinking that the Christian life depends on us in some way. Just teach us that our only part is faith, just to depend on you to do the living. That is what you want to do, and we thank you for that. It is an awesome, awesome thing that you have promise to do in us. We just thank you for that. Grace in Jesus name. Amen.