03 How to Recognize Sound Bible Teaching (1 Timothy 1:5-11)

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. How do you recognize false Bible teaching before it confuses your faith? An emphasis, teachers who sounded impressive and quoted the law with total confidence were quietly pulling believers away from the gospel. So Paul said to Timothy to stop them. In this episode, we'll uncover the true goal of biblical instruction and learn how to recognize the difference between teaching that has spiritual substance and eloquent word salad. This is the third talk in our study on the book of 1 Timothy. Today we'll be looking at 1 Timothy 1 verses 5 through 11. I'm really glad you joined us today. We are continuing our study in the book of 1 Timothy. Just a review, as always, the Apostle Paul wrote this letter to his disciple and friend Timothy. Paul has traveled on to Macedonia and asked Timothy to remain behind in the city of Ephesus to work among the church there. So far, we've only looked at the opening verses. Paul has identified himself as an apostle of Jesus Christ, that is, one who has the authority to speak for Jesus. And he's asked Timothy to charge certain individuals in the church there to stop teaching a different doctrine than Paul teaches. Paul says this group of teachers devote themselves to myths, that is, things that aren't true, and genealogies. And I understand that to be that they were teaching like the rabbis, appealing to endless lists of previous rabbis to support their points. Today we're going to get into what I think of as the body of the letter, and the first verse we're going to look at, one five, introduces us to what I think is the main theme of this letter. Having just asked Timothy to correct the teachers who aren't helping, he now talks about the kind of teaching that does help. And he says in one five, the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. So the aim of our instruction, that's what he means by charge, the whole point of teaching is love that issues from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. So he wants Timothy to teach the truth, and the goal of that teaching is love. What does he mean by love? As I've talked about in other podcasts, this is one of those passages that shows us that love is an action, not a feeling. When the New Testament writers talk about us loving each other, they're not primarily concerned with how we feel about each other. They are concerned with how we treat each other. And here we see that love is not a feeling that comes to you when you first convert and never goes away. Love is something that results from learning the truth. You are instructed in the truth, and the result is love. You act a certain way because of what you believe to be true. So the knowledge of the truth changes the way you act. Now we might ask whether Paul is talking about love for God here or love for people. You'll remember that Jesus says the two greatest commandments are love God and love your neighbor. Now, both of those are important. Jesus says loving God is the greater commandment and loving your neighbor is second. We have to learn to love God before we can learn to love our neighbors. I think because of what Paul goes on to say, that he is emphasizing here loving our neighbor. We'll see the focus of this book is on how they're to get along as a community of believers. So I think he's focusing here on how they treat each other or how they love each other. Now, of course, loving God is important, but as we'll see, one of the main themes of this letter is how we treat each other. And I think he's kicking off that theme with this verse. So the goal of teaching the truth is love, which is the way we treat each other. And this love comes from three things: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith. Now I think these three words are important to understanding the letter. These three words and a couple more closely related ones, which we're going to see later, appear frequently in the book. And taken together, they reveal one of Paul's main themes. So I want to make sure we understand them because they're the kind of thing that we just read by and think, oh yeah, I got it. Let's start with a pure heart. Heart is frequently used in scripture as a metaphor for the inner person. It's not only emotion or sentiment, as we kind of use it today on our modern usage. It describes the hidden seed of thought, will, affections, conscience, and moral disposition. So the heart refers to your whole inner life from which outward words and actions flow. So the heart is your true self before God, the place where your character is formed and revealed. The New Testament consistently uses the heart as a metaphor for the place of faith and conversion. It's the metaphorical place where we are changed by the Holy Spirit. And we see this in the Old Testament as well. Jeremiah describes the New Covenant as God writing his law on our hearts. So what does he mean by a pure heart? He means a heart that is not divided. The word itself means clean or pure or emblemished. It describes something that has had all the impurities and the dirt and the grime washed away. This word is often used as a metaphor for forgiveness. It is used to describe the forgiveness of sins as this metaphorical cleansing. So our guilt or rebellion or rejection of God, all of that has been washed away, leaving my heart clean and pure and focused on God. So I would say a pure heart is a heart that is focused and set on the promises of God. It is not a sinless heart. It is a heart that is turned away from idols. Instead of rejecting God, it seeks God. Instead of hating God, it loves God. And it is single-mindedly devoted to loving God. It is not divided. It doesn't love God half the time and idols the other half the time. So sanctification is this washing away, this removal of my rebellion to God. At the core of who I am as a human being, metaphorically, my heart, God has cleansed me of my rebellion, cleansed me of my rejection, so that now I seek Him. My focus on God is whole and complete and single-minded, not tainted or marred by seeking other gods, idols, or selfish gains. I think that's what he means by a pure heart, a person who is no longer against God, is not divided in his loyalties, but who is seeking God alone. Now that does not mean that we have been completely freed from sin. We will still struggle with sin until we get to the kingdom of heaven. But at the core of our person, we now grieve over that sin. We hate that sin. We long to be made holy and we long to seek God and His holiness. So the goal of teaching the Bible, the goal of our instruction is that it results in this action of love, and that action of love results from no longer rebelling against God, but seeking God because we have learned and embraced the truth. The next word he uses is a good conscience. This word is going to come up again in 119 and also later in chapters three and four. What he means by good conscience is a little harder to describe. The Greek word conscience is a little different than what we mean by our English word conscience. The problem with our English word is we have this idea that having a good conscience means we're innocent. If we have a good conscience, we are not guilty. We have a good conscience because we have done nothing wrong. We're in the clear. But that is not what Paul's talking about here. The range of meaning of this Greek word is this. In some context, it can mean just consciousness as opposed to being unconscious. So I am awake and alert as opposed to being asleep or unaware. So it can refer to the inner life of the mind. I am an awake and aware thinking creature. Other places, this word is used to mean the ability to make moral judgments. Unlike the animals, I don't act on instinct. I have the ability to make a rational decision. And when I make those rational decisions, I'm using my conscience. I'm using the set of moral values to make a choice. And that set of moral values is described as my conscience. We can see this usage in 1 Corinthians when Paul talks about some people who have a weak conscience. They believe that in order to please God, they can't eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols. And what they use to make that decision is their conscience, their set of moral values. I think that's the way he's using the term here in Timothy. We might think of it as the term worldview. It is the lens through which I look at the world. It's that set of beliefs I used to understand the world, but it also carries this idea of the moral judgments. It is the set of values I use to make moral choices. So having a good conscience is having the right knowledge plus understanding and choosing to live by it. I evaluate my life and my choices through an accurate understanding of the gospel, an accurate understanding of the truth. So I am making wise choices and I am on the right path. So a good conscience is this moral worldview that is composed of true, accurate, wise beliefs, and I have chosen to live by it. I have an accurate understanding of reality and the knowledge that I'm following that accurate understanding, and therefore I have a good conscience. Maybe I can sum it up like this: a good conscience is a set of correct beliefs that I used to make choices and to live my life by. I refuse to override or ignore those beliefs. Later in the chapter, Paul's going to warn that certain teachers have made a shipwreck of their faith by rejecting their good conscience. And the imagery there is they have run their vessel of faith aground by deliberately morally compromising themselves. Instead of letting their conscience, their correct understanding, be their guide, they've abandoned what they know to be true and therefore shipwrecked their faith. Imagine a sailor who knows his compass is pointing true north, but the course it's telling him to go, it means a harder trip. So he starts steering a few degrees off of north just to make it a little easier. He's not confused, he knows where north is, but he is deliberately choosing to ignore what he knows to be true. That's a bad conscience. That's what a bad conscience looks like in this letter. It's not that these teachers didn't know better. Paul says they shipwrecked their faith. They had a compass, but they stopped using it because using it was inconvenient. And then the last phrase in this verse is sincere faith, and I think he just means genuine belief. The Greek word for faith comes from the root persuasion. It is that which I am persuaded is true. So love results from a true, authentic, saving faith as opposed to hypocritical faith. The Greek text literally says belief that is not hypocritical. Not hypocritical is what they translate sincere. It's not a belief that I slap on the outside of my life by pretending to be something I'm not, like an actor playing a devoted husband eight shows a week. On stage, he says the lines, he looks in his co-star's eyes and means every word for the length of the scene. Then he goes home to a marriage he's been neglecting for years. The performance was convincing, it just wasn't real. It wasn't connected to how he actually lived. That's hypocritical faith. Sincere faith is the opposite. It's not a performance you step into during the sermon and then abandon on Monday morning. It is genuinely who you are, both on stage and off stage, or both Sundays and the rest of the week. Okay, so now I think we're in a position to understand what Paul is saying in this verse. The goal of our instruction, the whole reason we teach the gospel, is that as a community of believers, we would act with love toward each other. That is, we would treat each other well, and that action would come from a heart that is not divided in its loyalty to God, that has a clear, accurate understanding of the truth and genuine saving faith. So a pure heart is the undivided loyalty of our inner self to God, the sincere faith is a genuine persuasion of the truth, and the good conscience is the sustained refusal to violate that truth in practice. So to live like that truth is true. Now, this is in contrast to the teachers who are speculating. In contrast to them, Paul instructs Timothy to lead his flock to an understanding of the truth, and that understanding will lead them to believe the gospel and treat each other well. And Paul says, that's our goal. When you teach the Bible, that's what you want. You want to produce people who love each other well because they know God and love him and embrace the truth. Now, what's that in contrast to? Let's bring in the next two verses, look at six and seven. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. The image he uses is that he Paul set the path and they have wandered off the path. Instead of measuring themselves by the standard Paul set and the gospel he preached, they have wandered off course. They desire to be teachers, they desire to teach the law, they desire to be held in the high esteem as one who understands the truth, but they have deviated from teaching that truth into vain discussion. Vain discussion is foolish, it's empty, it's unproductive, it's talk that doesn't accomplish anything, it doesn't further anyone's understanding, it doesn't reveal the truth, it doesn't lead to a love of God or love of neighbor, it doesn't lead to a sound worldview and all the things he's just been talking about. Now notice how today's view of good teaching is very different than Paul's. Picture two people leaving church on Sunday. Ask the first one how the sermon was, and she says, Oh, it was incredible. I was in tears. I felt like God was speaking directly to me. But then you ask her what the passage said and she can't tell you. Then you go to the church next door and you ask the next person coming out the same question. And she says, honestly, the sermon was really kind of dry, but she can walk you through the passage verse by verse and tell you exactly what it said and why. Which one of those got taught the Bible? Paul would say the second one. But we've been trained to grade preaching on how it makes us feel in the moment. Paul grades it on whether you understand something true when you leave. If you asked your typical Christian, at least in America today, to describe a good preacher, most people would say a teacher who doesn't bore them, a teacher who's interesting and entertaining and tells these really memorable stories, a teacher who starts maybe with something funny and delightful, makes three quick points that are easy to cross off your checklist, and then returns to his opening story for a motivating and inspiring close. We're often more interested in how the message was delivered than what the message says. And I think Paul would measure a good teacher by their content, even if their delivery was dry as dust. A good teacher instructs people in the truth of Scripture so that they come to understand the gospel, understand the worldview of the Bible, and then out of that understanding seek to love God and neighbor. Let's spend a little more time on verse 7, desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. By law here, Paul means the scriptures, which for them was the Old Testament, because at the time he wrote this letter, the New Testament didn't exist yet. So these teachers are going to the right source, but they don't understand it. They don't understand what they are making confident assertions about. You've probably run into this kind of teaching. It sounds lofty and grand, but it's all vague metaphors borrowed from the Bible and strung together in meaningless phrases. Now you probably know this from the business world. We call it the corporate buzzwords. A speaker might say something like, We need to synergize our core competencies to unlock stakeholder value going forward. And everybody in the meeting nods and says, Yeah, yeah, let's do that. But no one has any idea what he said. But everybody nods because it sounds like the kind of thing a smart person would say. Well, Christian teachers can do exactly the same thing. You know, you've probably heard it. As we lean into the kingdom rhythm of grace, the spirit begins to stir the deeper places of our covenant journey. Well, I've just swapped out stakeholder value for covenant journey, and it's the same kind of trick. It sounds important, it borrows vocabulary that signals insider knowledge, but it says nothing anyone could actually pin down or disagree with. And Paul's point is: look, if you actually understand the text, you don't need to dress it up like that. You just say what it says. Several years ago, I was talking to a pastor, and we discovered we were both teaching through the book of 2 Peter. If you've read that book, you know that Peter devotes many, many, many verses to talking about false teachers. And the pastor lamented he didn't know what he was going to say in his next sermon because Peter was still on this topic of false teachers. And then he said, Quote, I've already said everything I know about false teachers. Well, I must have looked at him like one of those cartoon characters whose jaw drops to the ground. Because it's true, Peter says a lot about false teachers in his second letter, but each section approaches the subject from a different angle. Each one has a slightly different and nuanced point to make. All you have to do to teach it is understand the new angle and talk about it. So I tried to kind of gently say something like, hmm, well, why don't you say what Peter says about false teachers? If Peter continued on the topic, it's because he had another point to make. Say that. Even if he's repeating himself, you can ask, why is he repeating himself? Why is this so important that it bears repeating? If you're preparing to teach the Bible by asking the question, what am I going to say? you're starting on the wrong foot. Instead, prepare by asking, what does the passage say? And then say that. If you explain your understanding of the passage and hey, bonus, how you figured it out, you'll always have something to say. But if you don't understand the passage, you're in danger of wandering into vain discussions and word salad. And I think that's what Paul's getting at. These teachers, these other teachers, don't even understand what they're saying. And the reason they don't understand what they're saying is because they don't understand the truth of Scripture. And because they don't understand the truth of Scripture, even though they make confident assertions about it, their teaching lacks any real substance. Let's bring in the next paragraph, look at eight through eleven. Now we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully, understanding this that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. Now again, by law he just means scripture. He's using law as a shorthand to refer to the Old Testament scriptures, which were all the scriptures they had at the time. He's been criticizing these people who want to be teachers of scripture, so he makes it clear he's not against Scripture itself. Studying the law, studying scripture is a good thing. It's their approach to scripture that's the problem. There's a right way to study and teach scripture, and there's a wrong way. How do we know if we're using scripture right now? What must we understand to approach it properly? Where Paul tells us, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and the disobedient. A good teacher must have a basic understanding that scripture was given to sinners. One of the assumptions they must bring to the text is that scripture was given to people who are sinful, not to people who are basically good or holy. That's his point. And then he gives a long list of immoral people. At first glance, it might sound like Paul is saying, Well, we should use the law to correct these evil people. And there are these good people, and they don't need the law because they don't need to be corrected, but other people are evil like this list, and they're the ones that need to hear the law so they can be corrected. That's not what he's saying. It's clear from Paul's other letters that Paul believes every human being is born sinful and all of us are evil, with the exception of Jesus, not a single one of us can be described as holy and righteous. So Paul's point is human beings are sinful by nature. If we forget that fact, we might think that the law or the scripture teaches us how to prove to God how wonderful we are and how obedient we are, and let all the holiness that with is within us shine forth. And we certainly see that attitude in the Pharisees. The Pharisees thought they were basically just and right before God, as evidenced by their stellar ability to keep the minutia of the law. They studied the law to find ways to further their obedience, to prove how good and righteous they were. And Paul says, look, if you approach Scripture with that kind of attitude, you are never going to understand it. If you're going to understand the Bible accurately, you have to realize all of us are rebellious, sinful, evil creatures. It is a huge mistake to think that I can go to Scripture to prove my worth and acquire God's favor by my obedience. That mindset is naive and that's not what Scripture's for. Imagine you're going to your doctor's office and you're reading the list of symptoms for a serious illness that's maybe posted in a big poster on the wall. But your goal is not to check whether you have any of them. Your goal is to prove to the doctor that you don't. So you walk in and say, see, none of these apply to me. I'm not on the list. Well, you've missed the point of the list. It wasn't there so you could feel superior to the people who are sick. It was there so you could recognize that you yourself have a disease and do something about it before it kills you. Well, that's what the Pharisees did with the law. And that's what these teachers in Ephesus were doing. They were looking at the law saying, Let me show you how righteous I am. But Paul's saying the law isn't there so that you can rank yourself above others. It's there to show you that you have a problem with sin. The scripture was given to sinners like us to teach us that we are sinful and that we need a savior. It wasn't given as a checklist to prove our worth, precisely the opposite. It teaches us how far short we fall, and any teacher who doesn't see that is not going to teach well. Now I think it's interesting that if you study church history and you look at the churches and denominations that have gone wrong and wandered off the biblical path, statistically, what's the first doctrine that goes? Sin. Historically, sin is the first thing they stop talking about. And Paul says here, understanding sin is crucial. It is necessary to handling scripture well. Instead of seeing the law as a mirror to expose their sin, these vain teachers in Ephesus treated the law as raw material for these speculative theological theories and academic advancement. Now, from what I can tell about the religious environment of the first century in Ephesus, this problem took two overlapping forms. One was a kind of Jewish Christian legalism. So following the Pharisees, they used this meticulous observance and intricate interpretation to claim they were better Christians, a higher spiritual rank. The other was kind of a proto-gnostic view that turned the law into esoteric knowledge. So they looked for hidden codes and angelic hierarchies and speculative systems that conferred prestige on those who mastered the system. Well, in both cases, they stopped seeing the law as something that exposed their sin and used it instead as a means to consider themselves better than others. And Paul says, You've missed the point. The primary job of Scripture is to drive sinners like us to Christ. Paul follows that with a handful of specific examples of sin, and then he generalizes, saying to those who practice anything that is contrary to sound doctrine, which he defines as, verse 11, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. So sound a doctrine conforms to the gospel that was taught by Jesus and the apostles. Any doctrine that conflicts with the gospel that Jesus taught and entrusted to Paul is unsound. I think that's the point he's making. God gave the law to sinful human beings. All of us are capable of all kinds of evil, everything on the list. Now, maybe we all haven't done each individual thing on the list, but all of us are capable of it. We have no reason to look down on others and think ourselves morally superior if we avoided a particular item on the list. Put in the right circumstances with the right pressure and temptation, any one of us could commit any one of the items on the list. And if I don't know that's true of me, then I won't handle the scriptures well because I don't even understand the gospel. The other striking choice, I think, about these items on the list in 1 Timothy 1, 9 through 10 is that Paul selects examples that are all relational and communal. Those who strike their fathers and mothers, enslavers, liars, perjurers, all those describe the way we treat each other. They describe actions that break the basic patterns of ordered human life. They break the family, the authority, personal integrity, the trustworthiness required for society to function. The sins he lists are not primarily private ones. He could have said things like arrogance, pride, anger, jealousy. Those are more private. Instead, he picks sins that break public societal norms. They destroy the peace and mutual trust of a community. And remember, how we relate to each other as a community of believers is one of Paul's main themes in this letter. So I think he's picking examples of relational chaos. Now notice how much this section emphasizes that the gospel makes a difference in how we live. In Ephesians, Paul talks about this as walking in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called. There's a way of living that conforms to the gospel and a way of living that violates the gospel. If we claim to be followers of Jesus, if we claim to believe the gospel is true, but then we go out and live like it's not true, we don't really believe it. But if we believe the gospel, then we will necessarily want to live by what God says is true, even if we do so imperfectly. So to wrap this up, what can we take away from this paragraph? There are two fundamental ways we can approach scripture. Think about opening a bill. You can open it one of two ways. You can open it hoping to find a mistake, hoping it says you owe nothing, so you can call and say, See, I don't actually owe anything. Or you can open it honestly, see the number, and deal with what you actually owe. That's kind of the choice that Paul is laying out for how we read scripture. We can open it looking for proof that we're square with God already. Like the Pharisees, we can see the scripture as teaching us how to obediently reveal our holiness and demonstrate to everybody what great people we are. And that's the wrong approach. We will never rightly understand scripture if we start from that perspective. Or we can open scripture and let it tell us the truth about who we are and who God is. We can approach scripture realizing that God gave it to sinful people just like us to show us how to find mercy and forgiveness. And then because we have rightly understood who we are and who God is and the truth of the gospel and God's plan for salvation, we grow in our love for God and our neighbors, and that changes how we live. And that's the goal of Bible study. That's the goal of our instruction. The goal of any and all good Bible teachers is to produce the understanding that leads to a changed life, a life that actively loves God and neighbor. Our goal is to teach the truth clearly so that people embrace it and are changed by it and seek to live it out in their own lives and their community. Thank you for listening to Wednesday in the Word, the podcast that explains not only what a passage means, but also shows you how to figure it out. The blog version of this episode is on wednesdayintheword.com slash 1Timothy 3. You can find all the episodes in this series on wednesdayintheword.com, as well as my many other Bible study podcasts. There's no charge, no spam, and no ads, just free trustworthy resources to help you grow in understanding scripture. If you've been blessed by this podcast, please leave a positive rating wherever you listen and follow the podcast so you don't miss an episode. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned and maybe where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coast. You can hear more of Reggie's music on heartfeltmusic.org. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.