2 Timothy 4:1-5
Introduction
You may or may not know that I’m involved in the area of apologetics. If you are not familiar with apologetics, it is about providing reasons for holding to the Christian faith. It often includes a defence against attacks on the faith. To some, that might seem like a distraction from pastoring. But I have learned differently.
While I had some interest in apologetics before becoming a pastor, my involvement really took off when I became a pastor. I would go as far as to say that I am an apologist because I am a pastor. Here is my story.
When I was at my previous church, I lived in the same town as a well known religion writer. He had just written a best seller that claimed that Jesus never existed and that the Gospels were based on pagan myths. There was a picture of him in the local paper sitting in a church with stained glass windows, claiming that Jesus never existed. People in our town, including people in our church, were very upset. I remember one man in his 90s coming to me after one Sunday service. He was red in the face and shaking with anger. He handed me every newspaper clipping he had on this author and asked me, “What are we going to do about this man?” One of my deacons came to me, equally upset, and asked why the clergy were not responding. I had talked to one of the other local pastors and he had strongly urged that we not respond. He felt we should just not get involved.
I don’t actually like confrontation, but as a pastor I felt I had to do something. I ended up co-writing a book responding to that author. Before the book came out I planned a Saturday morning talk at our church. There was a blizzard that weekend and I showed up just to let the one or two people know t was cancelled. Fifty people showed up to hear the talk.
I had an individual show up in my church office who confessed that he had almost given up on the faith after reading that other author’s book. Then he read our book and felt his confidence in Christianity was being rebuilt. It was all worth it.
I want you to know that I didn’t hate the man who wrote that book. I had coffee with him and we had a pleasant conversation. In fact one of the main criticisms we received for our book is that we were too nice. I was fine with that criticism.
The reason we wrote the book was not to attack a man but to respond to ideas. We were convinced that there is such a thing as truth and that what he was presenting was false teaching. This was something not just affecting scholars but people in the pews.
False Teaching in the Early Church
What I’m talking about is not new. It goes back to the very beginning of Christianity. Jesus not only preached the truth, he was the truth. But the truth scares people and so people try to change the truth, to make it more comfortable and more controllable,
The passage we read is from one of what is called the pastoral epistles. That should give some indication of how relevant this is. Second Timothy is probably the last letter that Paul ever wrote. He wrote it to one of his close friends. Imagine if you knew you were about to die and didn’t have much time to say what you wanted to say. What would you want to tell those close to you? For Paul it was about the dangers of false teachers. We was concerned about how this would affect Timothy and so he warned his friend to be watching. I find it interesting that this is what he said immediately before stating that he is close to death. The very next verse after this warning talks about Paul’s impending death. This tells us something about how important this was for Paul.
We learn two things about false teaching from Paul’s words. One is that there will always be people who will offer false teaching and there will always be people who will listen to it. False teachers have a variety of motives. Some know it is wrong but are greedy. Others are sincerely mistaken. Either way, their teaching is dangerous. If your doctor gives you the wrong medical treatment,
