As soon as people began to share the gospel, false teachers started coming out of the woodwork. There were people who didn't like what the Lord had to say, so they changed His words to suit their own desires. They twisted the word of God in order to justify doing what they wanted to do.
Paul urges Timothy to be brave enough to speak out against false doctrine. Timothy is a young minister and there are people who think they can take advantage of his youth and inexperience. But he is to stand firm on the word of God just as Paul and the other apostles and teachers do.
Performing the office of a church leader is no doubt an intimidating prospect for a young man like Timothy. In standing up to things that were wrong in the church, I'm sure some of the wrongdoers opposed him by saying, "Who do you think you are, young man? Were you a disciple of the Lord Jesus, like Peter and the other apostles? Have you founded and guided a number of churches like Paul has? Do you have years and years of experience on your resume? No? Well, then what gives you the authority and experience to tell us what to do?" This is why Paul will tell him later on in this first letter not to be discouraged by people's attitudes about his youth, "Don't let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity." (1 Timothy 4:12)
Being young doesn't mean a person can't set a good example. I belong to a church where the youth group regularly sets an example for the rest of us to follow. We have a large amount of young people in our church and they are so in love with Christ that I think they are outdoing the rest of us when it comes to enthusiasm and good works. I wish I'd been like they are when I was their age, but instead I was living apart from the church and the Lord, living in sin, and doing nothing for the kingdom of Christ. I was going with the flow and doing the same things my friends (who were as lost as I was) were doing. So we must never take a condescending or dismissive attitude toward the godly advice of someone who is a young Christian, for it takes courage for them to swim against the stream in a world that constantly flings temptation in their faces. The youth of today have to face things I couldn't have dreamed of when I was their age, so the fact that they are living for the Lord in spite of how easy it would be not to live for Him should tell us that their advice should be taken to heart.
"As I urged you when I went into Macedonia, stay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longer or to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work---which is by faith." (1 Timothy 1:3-4) What's a good way for Satan to keep us from growing in the faith and sharing the gospel? By distracting us. By taking our focus off the things that really matter. So Satan allowed disputes to arise over pagan doctrine that was brought into the church by Gentile converts and over genealogies that were brought into the church by Jewish converts.
We all bring baggage with us when we come into the church, don't we? We all have stuff in our past that comes right along with us, and it's important that we don't allow false beliefs to infiltrate the church. A false belief might not take the form of an outright lie. It might take the form of thinking we need to hold onto guilt over our former way of living after we come to Christ. Or it might be that things of the world that influenced us while we were lost are still influencing our thinking after we are saved. We are all coming from different backgrounds and we were taught things by other people, in both words and actions, that still affect us today. As we grow in the faith we have to learn to let go of anything that doesn't line up with the word of God. We have to learn to disregard whatever we were told about God that doesn't stand up to the character of God which was revealed to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
We are not behaving in a loving attitude toward each other when we engage in disputes. We are to obey God's law when interacting with each other, and that law is the law of love. "The goal of this command is love, which comes from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith." (1 Timothy 1:5) Love fulfills the law, as Paul said in his letter to the Romans, because "love does no harm to a neighbor". (Romans 13:10) The Lord Jesus said the same thing when He stated that the two greatest commandments have to do with love: loving God and loving our fellow man. (Matthew 22:36-40) When we take a look at the Ten Commandments, we see that they have to do with how we relate to God and to our fellow man. If we love God, we will stay in right relationship to Him, and if we love our fellow man we will stay in right relationship with him. If we take a look at the Mosaic law, we see that it has to do with how we should interact with God and with how we should treat our fellow man. So love fulfills the Ten Commandments and the law of Moses because love helps us honor God as we should and treat our fellow man as we should.
False doctrine, of course, should be exposed as false doctrine. False teachers shouldn't be allowed to teach in our congregations. But one of the primary problems that faces the churches of today is the tendency of church members to get caught up in minor differences of opinion. I know of one local church that nearly split up over whether or not to purchase a stove for the room where they regularly share meals together. Some of the members thought it was a sin to purchase a stove because the church had never owned one before and had gotten along fine without it. Other members thought it was a practical expenditure of money because it allowed them to cook or reheat things so they wouldn't have to consume lukewarm meals or serve lukewarm meals for a grieving church members following graveside services at the cemetery. I'm not making fun of this church or putting them down; I'm just using them as an example of how something small can quickly turn into a very big deal. Church members got really angry with each other about the stove. A loud argument broke out when they met together to vote on whether or not to purchase it. Did God care whether or not the church bought a stove? I don't see why He would, since it's not a sin to own a stove. But God did care about whether the church members maintained a loving spirit toward each other. You wouldn't think that an issue so small could have caused so much disunity, but this is the type of distraction Satan uses to cause trouble in a church. This is how Satan keeps a church from doing what God has called it to do, and how he breaks up true friendships, and how he causes people in the community to be turned off from the very idea of attending church to hear the gospel.
Let's not give the devil a foothold in our churches or in our relationships with God and with our fellow man. If something is a lie, we must expose it as a lie and put a stop to it. But if something is a minor difference of opinion, we need to love each other and agree to disagree.
No comments:
Post a Comment