MOOR of the Word with Pastor Chuck Pourciau

Are you content? If not, why? 

Join Pastor Chuck as he discusses what it means to be content and how godliness leads to contentment.

There is no clearer barometer of spiritual maturity than how we spend money. None.

Let’s ponder some principles of our relation to money as revealed in God’s Word. First, Scripture doesn’t teach that money, in and of itself, is sinful. Rather, it teaches that a wrong attitude toward it is sinful and destructive. 

The end result of false teaching is constant friction. People are continually being rubbed the wrong way by the teaching, the attitudes, and the sinful behavior that flows from errant instruction. It’s impossible for false teaching to produce unity in the church. Only the truth, ministered by God’s Spirit, can bring unity.

They speak “arrogant words of vanity.” False teachers have an overinflated sense of their own importance, not hesitating to rebel against God and His Word. That merely confirms, however, that they are infected with a deadly spiritual disease.

Paul went on to write that, in addition to being conceited, the false teacher “understands nothing.” In arrogance, he claims to know everything but understands nothing. All of his imagined intelligence, pretended scholarship, and supposed deeper insights amounts to mere foolishness to God. Romans 1:22: “Professing to be wise, they became fools.”

The primary function of a spiritual leader is to feed his people the Word. They will then avoid the poisonous weeds of false doctrine and grow to maturity.

We have been discussing that false teachers can be recognized by what they affirm if what they affirm is contrary to Scripture. But the flip side of that is that false teachers can also be recognized by what they deny. Paul described that by noting that they do “not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ.” This verb is in the present tense, indicating that false teachers are in a continuous state of not agreeing with sound doctrine. 

“Sound” is from the Greek word, hugiaino, from which we derive our word 

“hygiene.” False teachers are not spiritually or doctrinally pure. They suffer from a lack of doctrinal hygiene. Titus 1:9: “. . . holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.”

Physical diseases have symptoms, or marks, by which they may be diagnosed. The same is true of false teaching. Those infected by it will manifest certain characteristics. In this verse, Paul identifies them as anyone who “advocates a different doctrine and does not agree with sound words, those of our Lord Jesus Christ, and with the doctrine conforming to godliness.”

There were already some in the Ephesian church who were carriers of the cancer of false teaching. “Anyone” indicates Paul did not want to limit his warning to any specific teaching or teachers. He gives a generic warning embracing all false teaching. It includes everything Timothy faced, as well as all the false teaching the church would subsequently encounter.