All right, we're going to look
at 1 Timothy chapter 1. Paul opened this letter to this
young man, this young preacher, pastor. I don't know how old
Timothy was at this time, but he was in Ephesus leading the
church or helping lead the church through some troublous times
because certain men had crept in. And usually, you know, when
you deal with false preachers who come into the church, you
need to understand that they come in stealthily, quietly,
claiming to agree with what we believe. You understand that
now? You know, in the early stages of the New Testament church,
Satan did his greatest work outside the church with the persecutions
that went on. And you read it in the book of
Acts, well, even before that in the four gospels, You know,
Christ said that the world would hate us because it hated Him.
And the reason it hates us, we know, is because of the message
of God's grace and salvation conditioned on Christ exposes
their hope of salvation by their works or their wills is no good. And, you know, when you go to
exposing a person's hope of salvation as being dead works and fruit
unto death, that doesn't sit well with them. I know that by
experience, and I'm so glad and thankful that the Lord prevailed
in this old sinner's heart, because that's what you need, isn't it?
It takes the spirit of God to bring us down in humility, the
humility that we needed, the humility that's before God. But
false preachers who, you know, Satan did his best work, his,
not best, I'll say the hardest work outside the church and you
see in the first in the book of Acts in the beginnings of
the New Testament church how they were persecuted by the unbelieving
Jews by the Romans and even the Greeks all up but here in the
last days I believe he's doing his greatest work inside and
we see that in Satan sowing his tears now I know a lot of people
You know, when you talk about the wheat and the tares and all
of that, people will say, well, that's the fact that you have
believers and unbelievers in the church. And the wheat, that
represents the true believers, and the tares, the unbelievers.
And you can make that application because as long as this world
is in existence before the Lord comes back, you'll always have
sheep and goats together, won't you? And he's going to separate
the wheat from the tares and the sheep and the goats. But
now the parable of the wheat and the tares, I believe, refers
mainly to false churches in the world that call themselves Christian. And I'm not going to go into
that. I've preached on that before. But just like in the kingdom
parables, starts off in Matthew 13. He talks about sowing the
seed, and then you'll have wayside hearers, and stony ground hearers,
and thorny ground hearers, and then the good here. Now that's
believers and unbelievers. The good ground here is the believer.
The rest of them are unbelievers who maybe for a while had a profession
of truth, but they left it. And they didn't really believe
it. But what we see in the parable of the wheat and the tares, Satan's
going throughout the world sowing his tares. And if you see a building
somewhere where people gather religiously, calling themselves
Christian, but the gospel is not their theme and their basis
and their goal, that's a tare. That's a tare. And you remember
what the servant said, well, should we go root them up? No, let them grow together in
this world now. And one of the reasons I say
that is when you have like this right here, look at what he says.
He says, verse three, that we dealt with last week. I besought
thee to abide still at Ephesus when I went into Macedonia, that
thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.
You command these who are teaching other doctrines not to teach
that. Now that's not letting the tares and the wheat grow
together, is it? See? So, in other words, you expose
them and stop them. Now, we're not commanded to go
around town, and if we know of a false church, to try to stop
them from meeting. We're not commanded to do that
at all. Christ will separate the wheat from the tares in that
sense. I hope I'm making myself clear on that, you know. But
if you have unbelievers in the church causing trouble with false
doctrine, then it's up It's up to me and the elders of this
church to put a stop on. And it's up to the members of
this church to follow us in that endeavor. And that's what he's
saying here. So look at what he says in verse
four. He says, neither give heed to fables. What are these fables? They're myths. Myths of imagination, falsehoods
that come from human reasoning and not the scripture. In other
words, what they're teaching is not scriptural. It's a myth. It's something they've come up
with in their imagination. He says in verse four, neither
give heed to fables and endless genealogies. There's a couple
different ideas on that, but you know what I think of when
I see these genealogies, that what he's talking about
is those who, the Jews, the unbelieving Jews, who were so set on proving
their heritage back to Abraham. And I thought about Paul, for
example, what I've got here in your lesson, Jewish genealogies
that cause people to get caught up in tracing their Old Testament
heritage to the nation Israel. And I thought about Matthew 3,
verse 7 through 9. Remember John the Baptist? He
stood there and he told the Pharisees, he called them vipers. And he
said, think not to say in yourself, we be Abraham's seed. We come
from the seed of Abraham. And what he said, that doesn't
mean anything. And you remember Christ told him in John chapter
8, he said, I know you're Abraham's seed physically, genealogically,
but you're not Abraham's seed spiritually. Your physical genealogy
that traces you back to Abraham means absolutely nothing. And
one of the reasons I think that's what it's talking about is they
claim to be Jews, they claim to be experts of the Old Testament,
and we're gonna teach you what it really means, and then they
went off kilter and went off the gospel. They weren't preaching
Christ from the Old Testament. They weren't preaching righteousness
by him, but they were teaching it by the law. And we'll see
more of that next week, Lord Willem. So that's what I think. And I thought about Paul in Philippians
3. Remember what he said? He was a Hebrew of Hebrews. See,
that's the genealogy. I'm a full-blooded Hebrew. That
means something. You ought to be impressed with
me, you know, because I can trace my roots back to Abraham or David
or, you know, that kind of thing. Now, I know other people get
involved in genealogies in other ways, and that may have an application
here. But Paul had already taught that
all distinctions of nation and heritage were totally removed
in the gospel economy. The only thing that matters is
how do we stand with Christ? That's it. And that circumcision,
you know, they bragged about their circumcision, which began
with Abraham, the law of circumcision. And what did he say? God forbid
that I should glory save in the cross of Christ, by whom the
world is crucified unto me and I unto the world. For in Christ
Jesus circumcision means nothing nor uncircumcision, but a new
creation, a new creature, spiritual circumcision that brings a center
to Christ. God-given faith and God-given
repentance, God-given perseverance, looking unto him, the author
and finisher of our faith. So any teaching, outside the
scriptures or any teaching that would promote any notion that
a believing Jew was more saved, more righteous, more devout,
more entitled to heaven because he's a Jew, that's contrary to
sound doctrine. I see these ads on TV about some
of the poor Jewish people in Russia. It breaks your heart,
doesn't it? And you want to help them. I
mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But there's one guy that
comes on there. He said, if there's ever been
a time that we need to help God's chosen people, it's now. Well,
I agree with that. I just don't agree with him on
who God's chosen people are. God's chosen people are those
who believe. That's who God's chosen people
are. And like when you see things
like it, you want to help people. You want to be compassionate. You want to be charitable, and
all of that, there's nothing wrong with that, but we're not
promoting their religion now. That's what we need to understand.
So he says, endless genealogies, and these endless genealogies
which minister questions rather than godly edifying, which is
in faith, so do. In other words, what we preach
concerning salvation, concerning a right relationship with God,
concerning righteousness, forgiveness, concerning heaven, concerning
obedience. What we preach, it's meant to
build up the church, not to tear it down. Legalism, for example,
mythology or endless genealogies and legalism, tears down the
church. It doesn't edify. Edify means
to build up. That we, and this edification
involves our hearts being established with grace. Remember that in
the book of Hebrews. In other words, whatever I hear
from this pulpit, whatever you hear, from any preacher here,
it ought to build you up to the point that your heart is more
firmly established in the grace of God that reigns through the
righteousness of Christ. That's what it ought to do. It
ought to give you more assurance. And I'll talk about that later
on in the other message. But, you know, if you're a believer
and you're having trouble finding assurance, I can tell you exactly
what the problem is. I don't even have to x-ray you.
You're looking not to Christ, but to self. Now that's the problem. And you're trying to figure out,
well, I don't do enough. I don't measure up. Or I was
a idiot last week and said something I shouldn't have said. Well,
you may have meant all those things, all right? And you shouldn't
do that, and you should repent of that. But our assurance of
salvation is not law-based, works-based, conditional. If you find somebody
who cannot find assurance of salvation, you can just about
bet that they believe salvation is conditioned on them in some
way, to some degree, at some stage. Because assurance of salvation
doesn't come from looking at yourself in the mirror. Because
all the flaws, all the problems, oh man, don't we have them? Good
night. I mean, and we all have them,
even the best of us, even the worst of us, everybody in between. Is there ever a moment in my
life that I can say, well, I don't need Christ this second, I can
depend on myself? No. Assurance comes from looking
unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Look unto Him and
be He saved, all the ends of the earth, for He's God and there's
none other, just God and a Savior. So Paul's telling Timothy, he
says, don't put up with this now. They're not edifying this
godly edification, which is in faith. In what? What is in faith? Looking unto
Christ, the author and finisher of our faith. That's what faith's
all about. It's not even, you know, there's no measure that
we can put on your chest where your heart is and say, now do
you have enough faith? Well, how much faith is enough?
And how do you measure how much you have? I'll tell you how you
measure it. Who are you looking to? Who are
you depending upon? Whose righteousness do you have
to have and whose righteousness has been given to you, imputed
to you? That's the measure of faith,
looking unto Christ. Okay, now look at verse five.
He says, now the end of the commandment, this is where I got the title
of the message, the end of the law, that's a commandment. Understand
this, you know, when we talk about law, we have to be specific. and understand what it's talking
about. For example, sometimes it'll talk about the whole Word
of God. Because the whole Word of God
is law. God doesn't make suggestions. People argue about, well, are
we under the law? Well, what law are you talking
about? They'll say the Ten Commandments or they'll say the Old Covenant
law. All kinds of different things that just confuse people. Whatever
God says is law. He doesn't make suggestions.
He doesn't deliberate with you or me. He didn't say, now Bill,
let's sit down and figure out what you need to do. No. No,
he just gives it out, and there it is. So, the end of the commandment. The word end there means the
finishing of the commandment as a goal that one means to reach. That's what that word, the end
of the commandment. Well, what is the goal of the
commandment? Any commandment of God. from
Genesis to Revelation? Well, number one, all right,
number one, the goal of the law of God is to drive us to Christ
for salvation, for righteousness. And I've got Romans 10 4. Randy
asked me, he said, you're going to talk about Romans 10 4? I
said, I have to. Christ is the end of the law for righteousness
to everyone that believeth. And you remember what the context
of that verse in Romans 10 for was. He's talking about the Jews
who sought righteousness by works of the law and not by faith,
which is to seek it and find it in Christ. So you understand
that. So this commandment here, I believe
he's talking about the whole word of God, his revealed will.
The Bible says that we're not under the law, we're under grace.
Now that's a different thing, but it means basically it all
boils down to being in Christ who kept the law for us and who
satisfied the justice of God for us. And I'm gonna talk about
that in the next message too in Galatians 3. But here's what
he says, now the end of the commandment is charity. Now what is charity? in the original language is oftentimes
translated love, and then oftentimes translated charity. It's the
same word. And of course, one of the most
classic and known passages of scripture that people go to to
understand this thing of love and charity is 1 Corinthians
13. That's the love chapter they
call it. Well, every chapter is a love
chapter, I think. But anyway, is charity. One old writer said that really
charity is a better translation to the English than love. And
I know what he means by that. A lot of people when they think
about love they think about feelings and romance and things like that. And of course that's not what
the Bible means by love. Now there is a love that is given
between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. that congenial love
that brings them together, that's another word. You know the word
agape and all of that, that's godly love, that's what this
is talking about. But charity has with it the idea of giving,
doesn't it? And that's what this godly love
is, it's a giving love, it's not just receiving. It's giving,
and I've got in your lesson, the love of God for his people
is a giving love. God so loved the world that he
gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should
not perish but have everlasting life. God's love gave his son
to his people, that's the world of his elect, you know that.
You know, I thought about this when I say, you know, we don't
have to be afraid of John 3, 16. I know what the world does
with it. They corrupt it. And say, well
that means everybody without exception. It doesn't. He's talking
about that which all over every tribe, kindred, tongue, and nation,
God has a people. And then I think about 1 John
3, where he talks about love not just in word, but love in
deed. In other words, you've heard
the old adage, love is not a noun, it's a verb. Well, it can be
both, you know. But love in action, and this
is what this charity is, this is the end of the law. And when
you think about it, you remember when the lawyer came to Christ
and said, what is the greatest commandment? And it was said,
love God perfectly, and love your neighbor, and love God with
all your heart, soul, mind, and body, and love your neighbor
as yourself. That's what he's talking about. Love one another. John said that in 1 John 4. But
then he based it on God's love to us. He said in verse 10, hearing
his love, not that we love God, but that he loved us and gave
his son, sent his son to be the propitiation for our sins. So
understand that. So the context shows us that
Paul's instructing Timothy to command some that they teach
no other doctrine. He had a goal in mind and it
was charity, it was love. And he gives us three things
here that we need to see. Look at it in verse five. Now,
the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart and
of a good conscience and of faith unfeigned. Now, do you know who
has a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned? A sinner
saved by grace, a true believer. And you look at that and you
say, well, what do you mean pure heart? Does that mean a perfectly
sinless heart? You know, the heart is the mind,
the affections, and the wills. It has to do with what you think.
It has to do with what motivates you. It has to do with your goals,
what you desire, and all of that. Can I always say within my heart,
within my thoughts and my goals and desires, that it's always
pure and sinless? The answer's no. I cannot say
that. I'd be lying to you. If you say
that, you'd be lying to me. And then you think about a good
conscience. You know what the conscience
is. That's the courtroom in your head. That's what I call it. That's where you judge good and
bad. That's where you let yourself off the hook, or you pat yourself
on the back, or you condemn yourself. I mean, that's the conscience.
That's what that's all about. And then faith unfeigned, what
you believe, all right? Unfeigned means it's not hypocritical,
it's sincere and it's real, all right? And of course, he's talking
about God-given faith. Well, what is this all about?
Well, the Lord connected this love with the true doctrine of
Christ. You remember, look over at Matthew,
see this. You know, I told you last week
that The religious world usually considers doctrine to be divisive
and mean. You know it? Oh, we don't go
by doctrine, they say. We just love one another. Well,
the Lord himself connected love to the right doctrine. Look at
Matthew, where was I? I got it here somewhere. What
did I say? My goodness. I'm having a senior
moment, folks. Oh, here it is, Matthew 15. All
right, look at verse seven. He says, you hypocrites, well
did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, this people draweth nigh unto
me with their mouth, and honoreth me with their lips, but their
heart is far from me, but in vain they do worship me. Now
look at this, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men. In other
words, they're not teaching the doctrine of Christ. What does
that mean? They don't have any love. Not this kind of love now. Oh, they love themselves. They
love the people whom they like, their family and other things.
They can love a lot, but they don't love God. They don't love
the brethren. If you teach false doctrine,
you have not the love of God in you. That's what Christ told
the Pharisees later on too. He says, I know you have not
the love of God in you. And it's because you don't tell
the truth. All right, we'll go back to 1 Timothy. What about
this pure heart, out of a pure heart? Well, what does the Bible
say about the natural heart of the natural person, man or woman? I've got in your lesson, Jeremiah
17, nine. The heart is deceitful above
all things, desperately wicked. So much so who can know? The
natural man can't even know his own heart because it's desperately
wicked and deceptive. Now understand when you're describing
such a person who is like that, don't draw the picture with horns
and fangs and a pointed tail and a pitchfork. That could be
the most kind, dedicated religionist you would ever meet. But they're
still deceived. And what does the Lord do when
he saves us from our sins? Well, let's put it, when we're
born again. He gives us a what? A new heart. A heart that's receptive
and humble, bowing before God, submitting to the righteousness
of God in Christ, who is the end of the law for righteousness.
So what is the pure heart? The pure heart is the circumcised
heart, Romans 2.28. The pure heart is the heart that
believes doctrine, truth, Romans 6.17 and 18. The pure heart is
the one that's cleansed by the blood of Christ and that's the
application of the reality of what Christ accomplished in his
satisfaction to justice that is laid on our hearts, our minds,
our affections, our will by the Holy Spirit through the preaching
of the gospel. And that's the only way that
we can claim a pure heart, forgiven by the blood of Christ. I think
we're gonna sing it today. What can wash away my sins? Nothing
but the blood. The pure heart is the one who
seeks and finds righteousness in Christ. That's the pure heart. It's the heart of faith. And
then secondly, a good conscience. As I said, the conscience is
the seat of judgment in the mind. We judge good and evil. Man by
nature doesn't know good and evil according to God's standard. He knows the laws of the land.
He can quote the Ten Commandments, all of that. He knows the difference
between immorality and morality according to man's standard.
But he doesn't know the difference between right and wrong, good
and evil according to God's standard. By his own standard, the natural
man calls good evil and evil good. To the natural man, all
or most religion is good. To God, it's sickening. You see that? That which is highly
esteemed among men is what? Abomination to God. And so how
do we have a good conscience? Well, the same way we have a
pure heart, a conscience that's cleansed by the blood of Jesus
Christ. And you can look at that in Hebrews
chapter 10, where it talks about, well, let's look at it just briefly.
I'm running out of time, so. Get to it here. Hebrews 10. Beginning at verse 19, having
therefore brethren, boldness, confidence, liberty, to enter
into the holiest, on what basis? The blood of Jesus. By a new
and living way which Christ hath consecrated, made new for us
through the veil, that is to say his flesh, that's his death
on the cross, his obedience unto death. Having a high priest over
the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart in full
assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil
conscience. and our bodies washed with pure
water. An evil conscience is a legal conscience. That's what
it is. So a good conscience is that
which by the application of Christ, the truth of his blood, whereby
we see that his blood, his righteousness alone brings us into a right
relationship with God that cannot be taken away. And then thirdly,
faith unfeigned, that's God-given, sincere faith that looks to and
rests in Christ for all salvation, and it's sincere, it's not hypocritical,
it is based upon the power of His glorious person and His finished
work, and that's what it is. God-given faith. Well, let me
read these last two verses. He says in verse six, now talking
about these false preachers, he said, from which some having
swerved or swayed or strayed have turned aside into vain jangling. You know what vain jangling is?
Empty talk. Worthless talk. Heretical talk. That's what it is. And so, in
other words, it's not truth that edifies and builds us up and
brings us together, it divides, it brings doubt. And then verse
seven, desiring to be teachers of the law. Now I'm gonna deal
with this more next week, Lord willing. Understanding neither
what they say nor whereof they affirm. They wanna be teachers
of the law. I know guys like that. They wanna
be teachers of the law. And probably what the law that
they're talking about is the old covenant, the law of Moses.
But we'll talk about that more next week. All right.