Dealing with Those in Error

Welcome to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon R.P. Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. Check us out online at www.sharonrpc.org. We pray that this message will be a blessing to you and that the Lord will use it to transform your faith and your life. This morning we continue this series out of 2 Timothy. I invite you to take your Bibles and turn to 2 Timothy chapter 2 and we will be reading verses 14-26 as we hear God's Word this morning. 2 Timothy chapter 2 verses 14-26. This is the Word of God.

Remind them of these things and charge them before God, not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers. Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. but avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene.

Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They are upsetting the faith of some, but God's firm foundation stands, bearing this seal, the Lord knows those who are his, and let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. Now in a great house there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some for dishonorable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy. useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.

So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart. Have nothing to do with foolish, ignorant controversies. You know that they breed quarrels, and the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome. but be kind to everyone, able to teach patiently, enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will."

Prayer for Illumination

This is the Word of God. which stands forever. Let's pray before we look at it this morning. Father, we come to you today and are grateful that we have heard your word, are grateful that you've given it to us, and grateful that it teaches us how to deal with controversies, with those who would teach error and how to correct them. We know that that is something that each of us, Lord, needs to learn how to do. We pray that we would hear what your word teaches us today, that you would both encourage us and challenge us, that you enable me to speak your word with clarity and boldness, but also accuracy, Lord, because we want your word to come through to us today. From Christ's name we pray, amen.

Sermon

Second Timothy, this little epistle that we've looked at these past few Sundays that we've been here, we will look at it today, has a lot to say about the deposit of the faith. that truth that is founded on Christ and demonstrated in the faithful sayings. We looked at just a couple of weeks ago, we ended that portion. This is a faithful saying. As we said, faithful sayings were little snippets of core biblical truth that Paul wanted Timothy to grasp hold of and say, these are foundational.

You must make sure that you pass these on accurately, and carefully. They are like little mini creedal statements found in the scripture. Why was Timothy told to pass these on? Because the Church was already being besieged by those who were departing from the Faith. Sometimes we have a nostalgic view of the early Church. Everything was so pure and nice. If we could only live in the early church. Read the pastoral epistles sometimes. Read the book of Galatians. Paul has to talk to the Galatians. You foolish Galatians. Who has snookered you? You guys have just been taken in. So other passages that warn us about that.

You know, I had a seminary professor who used to joke, he was not a member of a Reformed denomination, member of another denomination, but he was a preaching professor that I had. And he joked, he said he knew his denomination was the true church of the early church. He said, we asked him, Dr. Perry, why? He said, well, look at all those divisions. He says, my own tradition is that divisions all over the place. So we must have been the early church. He was looking at the book of 1 Corinthians. We Presbyterians, of course, have had our divisions.

Somebody said that we've had RPs, OPs, UPs, PCAs, and then somebody said, oh, we ended up with split Ps after we got done with all of this. In other words, division is here today, but it was there in the early church. Remember, Paul talks about all those factions.

Some followed this person, some followed this person, and there was even the holy one who said, I don't follow any of those. I just follow Christ. And Paul didn't say that, I don't think, positively. He was saying there were some people who were sort of holier than thou and saying, I don't follow these other people. I'm the one that's really got it all correct.

The church then has been subject to attacks and divisions from within, and it's been subject to attacks from without. We sometimes are a little oblivious to the tenacity with which we need to hold on to the truth. If you ever read about the so-called Aryan controversy with Athanasius and Arius in the early church, it's amazing to read about that. There was a very good popular book about this one time that it really helped me understand the tenacity with which those debates run because that was said that they had two things.

The both sides had developed their little jingles and they taught them to the school kids. to support their doctrinal statements. Everywhere you walked around in the towns, you would hear little school kids from one side or the other singing little jingles.

Or he said, one time he would go, if you went into your barber, your barber might ask you, so what do you think? Is it homoousios or homoousios? Today, most people would say, huh? You know, what are you talking about? But they took the truth at times in the history of the church extremely seriously. This is a Sunday that we oftentimes in Reformed churches celebrate Reformation Sunday. I'm going to be making a few allusions this morning sermon and in the afternoon sermon to the Reformation. because it was an important time in the history of the Church when crucial emphases had been lost and even distorted by the Church. People like Luther, Calvin, Knox, Zwingli, Butzer, Oklahmpotius, Bullinger, and a whole score of others helped restore the Gospel to the Church. Controversy was needed.

Yet the question that always comes back to us is, how? How do we deal with those who are in error? The question is not, can we avoid them? You can't. But then we'd have to know how do we deal with those who are in error? And Paul gives us some instructions here in this passage and how to do this. First of all, we should deal with those in error by one, making wise choices about what to speak about. Look at how he starts this passage.

He says, remind them of these things, that was the faithful sayings, and charge them before God not to quarrel about words which does no good but only ruins the hearers. He's going to mention at least three times in verse 16, verse 23, and verse 24 about useless squabbles. useless squabbles which immediately of course people who don't like doctrine like to put their finger on and say see I told you all this doctrinal stuff was no good those are just useless squabbles not so be careful because Paul has something else a little something else in mind and he doesn't isn't worried at all that there are some necessary squabbles if you think that Paul was a person that didn't think there were some things worth put it bluntly, squabbling about, you haven't read Galatians. I mean, anybody who can tell the foolish Galatians you've been snookered is willing to go to the mat for many things. And he's going to talk about some things he's willing to go to the mat for.

But the background to what's going on here is found in 1 Timothy. Because in that book, there were those who had some kind of strange interest in myths and endless genealogies, probably that were sort of early versions of what we call proto-Gnosticism, not full-blown Gnosticism like showed up in the second century, but early versions of this in which they speculated about genealogies and angels and other strange things and they were tearing the church apart with these endless speculations. He doesn't elaborate here on what those quarrels were. But like I said, it's highly likely that's what he's referring to since this is the second epistle he's written to Timothy. Again, this does not mean, let me underline this and say it again, it does not mean that all arguments are wrong, nor that every speculation is wrong. And Paul could be clearly polemical when the truth of the gospel was at stake.

Let me just give you an example from the Reformation. The Reformation, in many ways, Of the three or four things that were the key heart of the Reformation was the debate over the meaning of one word, justification. Does it mean we get Christ's righteousness imputed to us, the Protestant viewpoint, or are we changed into righteous people? And that's how we have right standing with God.

The medieval church had said, basically, you get salvation on the installment plan. Every Sunday you come to mass. It had kind of filtered down into a kind of a bald works righteousness to the common people, but in the official theology, it wasn't that. The official theology said the church has the goods. It has the ability to get your sins forgiven and to give you more righteousness because we have this treasury of merits in heaven from Christ's righteousness, the righteousness of the saints. If you collaborate with the church, Do your part with the church. The church will dispense it to you, primarily through the mass.

And you get a little bit more righteousness. And if at the end of your life, you have enough righteousness, namely saints, you go immediately to heaven. If you don't have enough righteousness, well, we also have this place called purgatory that can get rid of that last little bits of unrighteousness in you. But we also have, if you don't want to spend as much time there, we have these indulgences here. Put your money, you know, Tetzel said, when the coin in the coffer clinks, Clings the soul from purgatory springs. He could even do it for your dead relatives. They had a whole system all worked out on this.

It was all about the meaning of what does righteousness mean. Luther, studying the Word of God, came to the conclusion that righteousness was a gift from God. It was the righteousness of Christ, given to you, one piece, a whole piece. You either had it, or you didn't have it. It wasn't on the installment plan. You weren't more righteous today than you were tomorrow. When you trusted in Christ, you were all 100% righteous. The gospel was therefore a free gift. Christ's righteousness was a free gift.

Now you might say, isn't that a squabble over the meaning of the word righteousness? Yeah, in one sense it was a squabble, but it was a crucial squabble having to do with your assurance of salvation. Because think about this, if you didn't know you had perfect righteousness yet, if you're getting it on the installment plan, what assurance do you have of heaven?

Well, ooh, sinned again today, had a bad thought, said a bad word, lusted in my heart. I mean, you could go down the list of the commandments. Oops, don't have perfect righteousness anymore. Gonna have to go confess. I'm gonna have to go to the Mass again. I'll have it briefly, maybe for 30 seconds. And then, oops, slipped again. You have no assurance.

Luther was saying getting the word righteousness correct, understanding what righteousness was all about, was a central core of the Gospel. So some quarrels, yes. But Paul wasn't talking about that kind of quarrel. That's what he talks about actually in Galatians. He's saying that this is crucial. He talks about that in Romans. This is crucial. Here he's talking about fruitless squabbles.

Squabbles and speculations that would lead you astray. We don't have the exact same squabbles today. Maybe some of the new age people speculate in that sort of thing, but we have other kinds of strange speculations. TV preachers who speculate about the second coming and have huge charts and claim to have all the details all worked out and they know all the answers. We have those kinds of speculations, different kinds of speculations. In other words, those things that cannot be certainly found in God's Word. Those are things that sometimes, and then people speculate about them, and they become foolish speculations.

There's what Paul is talking about here. And again, this does not mean we should not have legitimate theological and philosophical discussions. Again, here's another example from the early church. We can go away from the Reformation here briefly and talk about the early church.

You heard me mention two words, mousias, And you say, that sounds awfully a lot alike. Well, they do. Because in the early church, in the so-called Arian controversy, it was all a debate about which word described Jesus. Homo Aesias meant of the same substance with the Father. Homo Aesias meant of Similar substance. One letter. And the joke by some historians is the whole Aryan controversy was not only about one word, but it was about one letter in one Greek word.

But do you see the difference between Jesus having identical substance with the Father or similar substance with the Father? Because if he's similar substance, then he's not fully divine. And our salvation is at stake there. Paul is not saying that things over which our salvation is at stake, those kind of doctrines are not worth lots of ink, lots of discussions. But he says there are some things that are foolish. Now you might say, how am I supposed to know? How am I supposed to know? Sanctified wisdom is the only solution I can give you. To know when is it proper to speak out and when speaking out would just bring quarreling about words.

Sometimes Christians are not always going to come to the same conclusion about some things in some situations. We have a lot of different denominations. Even within confessional reform circles, there are slight differences of opinions. So we have to understand that's going to happen sometimes. Because scripture may not give us answers on some things as clear as we want, and so Christians will make different decisions.

Second Point

But again, we need to ask for divine wisdom to know when we would be entering into a foolish speculation and when we would be standing for a crucial truth that it is absolutely necessary to talk about. The second point that we want to see in this passage is to recognize the seriousness of these fundamental theological errors. This is where Paul shows us that he is not talking about every single discussion. As he speaks here, after he talks about irreverent babbling in verse 16, he goes on to say will lead people more and more into ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene, and among them are Hermeneus and Philetus.

Now, you might say, who are these guys? And what were they talking about? These were people that he has already mentioned in 1 Timothy, who had, as he says, denied the resurrection, has said the resurrection has already happened. They had argued, basically, that Jesus Christ had already returned and the final resurrection had already occurred. You might say, huh? How could somebody say that?

Well, this error has not gone away. Today there's a movement called hyper-preterism that teaches essentially the same thing. And it is percolated through confessional Reformed circles. Presbytery that I was previously a member of had a man out in Omaha who adopted that viewpoint and he had to be disciplined by our Presbytery for arguing that the resurrection happened in 78... Jesus returned in 70 AD and the resurrection actually happened basically we just haven't figured it out yet. That's what he said. So this is not something that has gone away.

Paul apparently was instrumental in those two men's excommunication for false teaching because he said they were doing damage to the Church. Other than what Paul tells us we don't know a lot about that particular version of their false teaching. But it seems like perhaps they had imbibed some of this, what we call Hellenistic dichotomy between spirit and body, and they somehow had woven this into a false teaching. We know later versions would pop up in 2nd century Gnosticism, 4th century Arianism. Now Paul uses interesting language.

In verse 17, the ESV, which I'm reading, translates it as gangrene. I think the New King James that many of you have translates it as cancer. It's actually the root word we get our English word gangrene from. Whether it's cancer or gangrene, we're not quite sure what medical term Paul is using here, but we know that what does gangrene do?

It eats away at flesh. What does cancer do? It eats away at our own body. It's our body turning against itself. Paul is saying here, these men are like cancer or gangrene. Something that's spreading. Something that is eating away at the body of Christ. where how was it spreading? Well, we'll have to look at it later in a future sermon, but chapter 3 makes it look like it was spreading through the house churches, the small groups that were part of the larger church.

Now, I remember when I was pastoring full-time in the Iowa City area a number of years ago. I was in Evangelical Pastors Fellowship and we went there. We always had a good time. We prayed together once a month. We had lunch together sometimes and got to know those guys pretty well.

There were some men from some churches there that were just, they would say it, absolutely certain that if you had small groups in your church, it was going to be the salvation for any church. It was the key to healthy church life. It's like small groups were the panacea for every problem a church had. Now, I like small groups. I think small group Bible studies are good.

You guys have them here. But the way they talked about small groups, they forgot, 2 Timothy 3, if you get error in a small group, what does it do? It spreads like gangrene or cancer. When I was in my first church, there was a church, the Presbytery I was in, was a Presbytery in Illinois, and we had a church in the Chicago area, where a group of people came, all as a group. and they had come from another church, and there was a man who was kind of the leader of this group, and they came to this church, and they said, oh, we agree with your confession, we're with you, we want to be here with you, we like this church, they came and worshipped together, there was like 15 or 20 of them, and the church was very happy, because this seemed like a good group of people. Well, they continued to have their own little small groups, and they started inviting people from the local congregation.

Turns out, this man was teaching a crucial heresy about Jesus Christ, that when he took human flesh, he defested himself of all his deity, based on Philippians 2. It's called the Canonic Heresy. Spirit we don't need to go into those details right now, but that's what he was teaching and pretty soon the elders and the pastor started noticing There were some strange things popping up in adult Sunday schools and other groups because this group with this particular man as the leader had injected a false teaching into the church that was hitting at the heart of the faith. Because if Jesus ceased to be God, if taking the form of a servant meant that he ceased to be divine in any way possible, which is what this man was teaching, you have hit at the heart of the Christian faith. He set aside the outward display of his deity, but he didn't cease to be God. He was fully God as well as fully man.

All of this is to say, Paul is saying false teaching can come into your church, and it is something that can spread like cancer or gangrene, and it is something you have to be careful about. He says this teaching will lead to ungodliness. Did you know, here's what he says here, that this teaching will lead to ungodliness. He says that in verse 14. and can bring people to, verse 16 rather, and he says in verse 14 that it would bring people to ruin. Paul is talking about here about a belief, a false doctrine that led to a denial of a fundamental truth of the faith, the bodily resurrection. This other church I was referring to, it led to a false doctrine, a fundamental statement about who Jesus was.

Just a week and a half ago, I was at a conference of Presbyterian historians that I belong to in the Chicago area. And I was on a panel discussion. I also presented another paper. But I was on a panel discussion on J. Gershom Machen's Christianity and Liberalism. Because it's the 100th anniversary of that little book.

Machen's little book basically argued that Theological liberalism, as it was called, or modernism, which was coming into the church at that time, was a different religion than historic Christianity. He went through several key foundational truths and says it's not really Christian. He said they may use a few Christian terms here and there, but it isn't Christian.

That book has had over a hundred editions in 100 years. Matter of fact, when your RP, Reformation Translation Society, chose to pick its first book in 1950 to translate into Chinese, guess what book they picked? Machen's Christianity and Liberalism. Is that important? A book. So there are key truths. And why was Machen getting so upset?

Well, there had been a, pastor that had preached in First Presbyterian Church in New York City, a very liberal church. He got up and preached a sermon just shortly before, and that's the Shalva Fundamentalist Wind. That was the term for the people who believed in Orthodox doctrine.

And he said, well, you know, you really don't have to believe in the virgin birth of Christ because that's an optional theory that we have. That's what he said, an optional theory about who Jesus was. Yeah, it's nice to talk about Jesus being divine, but we all have a spark of divinity in us, don't we? Maybe Jesus is divine in that sense. And he listed a whole series of doctrines.

This idea of a bodily return of Christ. Well, that's kind of a nice theory, but maybe it's not going to really happen. Maybe this is just a figure of speech that the early church was talking about. Machen said, That guy can use some Christian language, but what he's saying there is just not Christian.

And virtually every mainline denomination in the United States was heavily influenced by that. And it's had splits and trouble ever since the early 20th, actually it started in the 19th century in America, but it came to its head in the 1920s, 1930s, over a hundred years ago.

So there are, when Paul says false teaching can spread like gangrene, he's saying, yeah, we've got these things here. We've got those foolish speculations. You want to avoid those, but we got these other core doctrines. You can't avoid talking about them. You've got to, because if you don't, they will spread like a cancer, like gangrene through your church. So if quarreling about words can lead to ruin, so can falsehood, especially on these core teachings of the truth.

Each one of us needs to take this seriously. Ideas have consequences. What a believer tends to think is what he will tend to do. You can't take basic errors in a nonchalant, oh, it doesn't really matter sort of way. Now, you might say, does that mean we fight over every doctrine? Not necessarily. Some things we have much greater certainty than others.

I like to think of it as sort of a series of concentric circles. There are these core doctrines that if you deny those, as Machen says, you cease to be Christian in any meaningful sense. You may call yourself a church. You may say, I'm a Christian preacher. I'm a Christian believer. But if you deny some of those things, you cease to be Christian in any meaningful sense.

Then there's a second level. Then those levels that become denominational distinctions. And some of those, are important. Yes, they are. Important enough that we can have denominational differences on them. But they're not quite the same as those core doctrines. Because we can recognize brothers and sisters in other churches as still Christian.

And then there are these outer circles. What do I mean by that? Well, I suppose there are a few issues that if I went around to a nice one of those polls, you know, and say, what do you think about this? I could come up with 15 or 20 different decisions or different interpretations of a particular text or a particular point of doctrine.

And here you are all together here at Sharon Reformed Presbyterian Church. Many of you members or members to be, some of you are taking a membership class, and you say, well, you know, I agree with my brothers and sisters here on all of these other points. You know, all the points, for example, in the Westminster Standards. But you know, I got this other, you know, I've talked to, I've talked to Sally over here, and I've talked to Jim over here, and you know, we disagree on this little point.

It's gonna happen. Some things the scripture just isn't crystal clear on. And we can have some differences. But the point is, there are some doctrines that are worth dying for. Literally. that were literally worth dying for. And that's what Paul is talking about here. This is crucial. That's what the Reformation was all about.

Luther said, I can make a squabble over a word because your salvation and your assurance of salvation is dependent on a word. What Luther was doing in the time of the Reformation was saying, here's a squabble that's worth it. Other ones, maybe not. Erasmus, the mild-mannered Dutch translator of the New Testament, who liked some of the things Luther did, got real upset with Luther and said, you're just making useless squabbles. And Luther said, no. And they had a big debate over the bondage of the will, for example. And Luther got mad with Erasmus, and he said, your thoughts about God are too human. And he said, you have to think God's thoughts, not human thoughts. Luther was saying, I got hills to die on, Erasmus.

First Point

You don't. You don't seem to have hills to die on. I do. But this passage also says that, thinking of the first point, there's some scum squabbles. just useless squabbles. Some hills to die on. But Paul also says, if we're going to do this, we need to seek to live godly lives. Now, that may surprise us, because we're saying, what in the world does living a godly life have to do with squabbles about doctrine? Whether they're the useless ones, or the hills to die on ones. Our temptation is this.

There's theology, and there's ethics, and never the twain shall meet. You know, if you study... the great theologians, you will often find that the same people who wrote theology texts also wrote ethics texts. I never forget a few years ago, one of the greatest of the reformed theologians in the last 130 years or so was Herman Bovink of the Free University of Amsterdam, the Dutch theologian. His reformed dogmatics are the fountainhead of, along with Charles Hodge, the American theologian of classic Orthodox reformed theology of our time. But how excited people were to find, though, that he never had them published, but he had a series of manuscripts from his lectures on Christian ethics, theological ethics. And they've been translating those into English. I think there's going to be like three or four volumes. Dogmatics were four fat volumes. His ethics are going to be about three fat volumes.

Because it shows us that Bovink was saying, what we believe gets translated into how we live. You know, some people tend to think it's like politicians. Some people will say, as long as a politician votes for the right thing, I don't care what he lives. He can be the most immoral man. Well, we all I think at heart say, you know, there's something wrong with that idea. It doesn't matter how a politician lives as long as he votes the right way. Paul is saying here, how you think needs to work and how you deal with false doctrine needs to be seen in your life. Living a godly life is a crucial part in refuting error.

See, look at verse 22. Actually, he starts it back in verse 20. Now in a great house, actually even further back in verse 19, let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity. In a great house, there are not only vessels of gold and silver, but also of wood and clay, some for honorable use, some from dishonorable. Therefore, if anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use. Set apart. as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work. So flee youthful passions and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart."

Then he goes back to talking about foolish genealogies again. Right in like a sandwich, in the middle of his discussion about dealing with false teaching, he says, by the way, you have to do this from a perspective, from a platform of godly living. He calls us to live a godly life in an extended section here in this passage. He tells us to present ourselves to God in a way that is not shameful, but handles the Word of God accurately.

By the way, he tells us that in the first part, he says, do your best to present yourself as one who is approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth. I have to take a little brief pause here because I think the ESV probably gets the best sense here, rightly handling the word of truth.

The King James and the New King James that most of you have says dividing the word of truth. If you know anything about the history of theology, especially in America, that verse has been horribly mishandled by using the term dividing. There is a Bible known as the Schofield Reference Bible in a theological system known as Dispensationalism that says dividing the Word of Truth means you chop the Bible up into various dispensations or errors and its original form said God had a plan of salvation that was different from each error.

I don't know from a Reform perspective if that falls into one of those hills to die on, I believe, kind of errors. The Bible is not chopped up into different ways of salvation. There's one plan of salvation. And that error is fundamentally opposed to our reformed understanding of the unity of God's covenant of grace.

So dividing, yes you can use dividing in the sense of understanding correctly, but the ESV gets it far more correct. Say it's handling. How do you handle the Word of God, not how do you chop it up into little sections where God had a plan here, plan A, oh that didn't work, let's try plan B, oh that didn't work, let's try plan C, oh that didn't work, classic dispensationalism, God had 7 plans of salvation and they didn't work until the final one, His grace plan. Total misunderstanding, chopping up the Bible. Paul is not talking about the chopping up the Bible into different plans of salvation. He is saying handling it correctly and accurately both for your doctrine and for your life.

He uses an interesting analogy in verse 19 and verse 20 of vessels. He is thinking of vessels in a wealthy home. He says there are honorable vessels, gold and silver, kind of the good China, if you will, that you get out when your relatives come over, when it's Christmas dinner, Thanksgiving dinner, get out the good silverware, you get out the good China, the vessels of honor.

But he also says there are vessels of dishonor. What in the world is he talking about here? Well, let me put it this way. You've got garbage cans and chamber pots. That's what he's talking about here when he says vessels of dishonor. It's like this. He's saying, now, when the family comes over for Thanksgiving dinner, I'll use a little more genteel. You're not going to put the dog food bowls in front of everybody on Thanksgiving dinner, are you? No. He says, you're going to get out the good china. He says, in handling these controversies, you got to see yourselves like honorable, not dishonorable vessels.

He says that we need to pursue righteousness and pursue virtue. In verse 22, he tells us very clearly that he says flee, and he tells us to flee youthful passions. Pursue, that means chasing after. All this implies the gentle spirit that he wants us to have when we deal with false teachers. Paul explicitly says that we should be gentle. Look at verse 24. 24. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. So we've got these Putting these pieces together. First of all, avoid crazy, foolish discussions. Find those hills to die on and don't be afraid to talk about them. But when you talk about them, do it with gentleness and patience.

This is the idea behind fleeing youthful lust. Why do we say that? Because I don't think youthful lust here necessarily talks about some kids whose hormones are raging too much. Teenagers have hormones that rage too much. There's no doubt about that. But I don't think that's what Paul is talking about here.

We notice sometimes young people, when they latch hold of an idea, what do they do? You get college-age students who latch hold of a political idea. Pretty soon, what do you see them doing? They got tickets and they're marching on the campus. They get excited about an idea.

Paul is saying here, yes, we need to contend for core doctrines, hills to die on, but you've got to do this with gentleness. You've got to do this in a way that recognizes it's another human being made in the image of God that you're discussing here. I'll give you a good example. URC pastor and theologian, Mike Horton, teaches at Westminster Seminary in California, has a great statement for new converts to the Reformed faith, new converts to Calvinistic way of thinking.

He says, many of them, he says, are what he called, should be called the cage stage. What does that mean? He says, we should probably put them in a cage for a few months, maybe a couple of years until they learn some balance and they learn how to argue their points gently and not just wanting to shred up their opponents and spit them back out.

I like that. It's easy for us to get a hold of a truth and then forget we're discussing with another human being made in the image of God. Gentle spirit. That's what Paul is talking about. He's saying our lives, people shouldn't walk away from that and saying, well, he may be right, but man, he's the most obnoxious, he or she's the most obnoxious person I've ever talked to.

Why in the world would I want to believe what he or she is saying? Now again, how do you do this? None of this is possible apart from the grace of God through the power of the Holy Spirit. But we are called to pursue this. We are called to seek this kind of attitude. It's interesting, throughout history, sometimes Christians have been noted for their firm stance for the truth, but it's also nice to be noted for having this kind of attitude.

Did you know that in 17th century, 16th century France, rather, the French Reformed people were called the Huguenots? They were the people who had heard Calvin's teaching, read many of his pamphlets, adopted the Reformed faith. Did you know there was a phrase in 16th century France that someone was as honest as a Huguenot? That's what the non-reformed people would say. Someone was as honest as a Huguenot. In other words, there was a character trait of honesty that was associated with Huguenots.

Paul isn't talking about honesty here, but I think the analogy is a good one because Paul is saying we should be noted in our theological debates in our correcting false teaching, whether it's our neighbors, our friends, our relatives, elders correcting the flaw, where people will say, that man or that woman does it in a kind and gentle and God-honoring way. and doesn't just shred me up and try to teach me something in a way that puts them on a pedestal as somebody who is smarter or something else, rather, some kind of way that detracts from the honor and glory of God.

We need to recover this gentle spirit without losing our passion for the truth. Now, in the scripture, again, passion for the truth is there. Think of Elijah on Mount Carmel. There's passion for the truth. He clearly has it. Paul, passion for the truth. We don't want to downplay the passion. We just want to have that gentle and ruthless, rather than a ruthless spirit in exposing error. Divine wisdom, again, and the power of the spirit is necessary.

And you know, we need to perhaps look at our temperaments. because we all have slightly different temperaments. There are those of us who are a little bit shy and retiring, and we might jump at that and say, I like that, what he says about the gentle spirit.

That's me. And then I would ask you, have you ever challenged anybody? No, I have a gentle, quiet spirit. If you're doing that, you're probably missing his previous point that some hills are hills to die on, and you need to challenge sometimes. But if you've got one of those temperaments that's the bold temperament, you know, one of those people that as soon as somebody says something is wrong, what do you want to do? I want to jump up and correct you. Some of us have that temperament. I have a little bit of that myself in me, and I understand that. That wants to jump up and correct as soon as you hear something wrong. We need to take seriously what Paul says here, that gentle and quiet spirit.

Paul doesn't address the issue of arrogance, but arrogance can show up in both of those. Arrogance can show up in wanting to correct somebody in a harsh way, but arrogance can also show up in saying, it's not worth it for me to take the time to correct your false teaching. But then the last point is another crucial point as well.

And that is, we trust in the sovereign grace of God to correct those errors. See what Paul says here. He says, the Lord's servant, and look at verse 24, must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone, able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.

Before we get to that, one thing I meant to say, if you'll let me backtrack here a little bit, That whole question of gentleness, we were talking about the Reformation, and Jenny and I saw a wonderful new documentary Ligonier put out. It's on Ligonier's YouTube channel, and you can go look at it. And I'm going to send to Jim, for example, today the link to it, if some of you wanted it. And you can get it from him.

It's marvelous. It's about an hour and a half documentary on the life of Luther. Taught me things as a church historian I never knew. Very good, has a lot of people you will recognize. Bob Godfrey, R.C. Sproul, a number of people. You can see Dr. Sproul was sick there because this was made just before he passed away in 2017.

But there's this wonderful little discussion in there about Luther, who was given to bombast sometimes. And he was one of those people who liked the passion of correcting and sometimes needed to temper his tongue a little bit. We can guess who challenged him on tempering his tongue. His wife, Katie, in one case, she called him down and she said, Martin, you attacked that other theologian. Yeah, that theologian was wrong, but you were not very gentle. And Luther was not gentle sometimes. For him, every hill virtually was a hill to die on. And his wife, Katie, had to call him down to say, Martin, Scripture does say you still have to be gentle in how you do that.

So that's just a little add-on on that previous point. But that's the last point. Trusting in the sovereign grace of God. Again, this is crucial. Underlying all of these divisions is the truth of God. God's truth is there. God's truth is is something that's foundational.

He knows, as this passage tells us, who are his own. He has put his seal and his stamp upon them. And this passage is a beautiful picture of how, in practical terms, God's sovereign grace works, practically. Paul tells us here, we are to correct. We are to be patient in our correcting, treating our opponents with gentleness, because God perhaps may give them the repentance that leads to life. God perhaps. It's very interesting. This enabling grace of God then is our hope. It's an interesting word here and it has an uncertainty about it. The uncertainty is not from God's perspective, the uncertainty is from our perspective.

God calls us to be instruments, and he says our job is to gently correct, gently point people to the truth. It's God's job to grant them the repentance that leads to life. Hear what Paul is saying here. You don't get someone in a full Nelson and say, okay, you got to change your mind because you are dead wrong. He says, no, you gently correct. And perhaps God will grant them the repentance that leads to life.

We simply have to be content with the fact we don't know what God is going to do with our words. And it's not our job to make sure that the person changes his or her mind. That's God's job, not our job. Repentance literally means, in Greek, change of mind that leads to a change of course in direction. And in this case, it's referring to knowledge of the truth. They come to their senses and escape the snare of the devil. Paul is saying very clearly that this is serious stuff. They're taken by the devil.

You present the truth, God will grant the repentance. Very important, Don, teaching on conversion, we present the truth, God grants the repentance, but how we will approach this and thinking there will be any hope of someone changing his or her mind.

Because sometimes we feel like failures. You know, I've talked to some of you, you may have felt like a failure sometimes. I'm talking to somebody, I think they're in error, and I presented the truth. How come they can't see it? It's clear as day in the Word of God. I presented the truth, why don't they see it? That's not your responsibility. Your responsibility is to claim the truth.

Because the issues Paul is saying are really moral at heart. Deep down, people believe or don't believe the truth because of the way it's going to impact them and the change it's going to have in their life. Why do unbelievers not believe the scriptures? Because if they believe the scriptures, it's going to change them. And they know that.

It's God's job to grant the repentance and break those chains and bring genuine freedom. Freedom from sin and freedom from serious error, which is always connected. The old King James used to say, peradventure. It's an old English word. We don't use that term. Peradventure. Let's face it, I bet none of you have recently heard somebody say peradventure. You know, that was an old English word for perhaps.

I had a seminary professor, Dr. John Gerstner, some of you maybe have seen some of his Ligonier things. Dr. Gerstner was a great man, one of the most passionate men I've ever known. I had the privilege, he came as a visiting professor several times when I was in seminary and I took a couple of courses with him. But he used to talk about, our job was to preach the word and then there was the great purr-adventure, he used to say. He was raised on King James, and that was a way of saying, I preach the word, it's God's puradventure whether he grants the repentance unto life.

We don't know what the Lord is going to do. It's not our job to figure out what the Lord is going to do. Our job is to proclaim the word. Well, to summarize today, we will find those people that we will run into, Some within the church, many with outside the church, who will be in error.

God will give us this opportunity. If we believe the scriptures and if we believe that the gospel is crucial for people's salvation, we inevitably are going to run into people that we are going to have to present truth that they are going to resist. Paul says we have to do it with gentleness. We have to do it in a way that recognizes they are creatures made in the image of God. But we do it with that great puradventure, to use Dr. Gerstner's phrase, that God will grant the repentance.

We need to have the wisdom that only God can give to know how and when. Sometimes we might simply say this person just wants to talk about foolish genealogies. I can almost guarantee you, if you're starting to present the gospel to somebody, and immediately they turn and say, but what do you think about this? I read something about it in the book of Revelations. They'll always put the S on at the end because they don't know it's the singular in the New Testament. And what do you think about the number 666? Oh, I read this cool book about the number 666 times. Let's talk about 666. I almost guarantee you if somebody's going to do that, they don't want to talk about the gospel.

They want to talk about foolish speculations because they read some pamphlets sometime that speculated about what the number 666 was all about. That's a time you may need to say, I'm going to walk away because this person is not interested in those hills to die on doctrine. This person wants to get into foolish speculations. However, there are many times they're not foolish speculations. There are those hills to die on where we have to say, this I have to talk about. This is foundational. That man or woman's soul is dependent on coming to that truth, understanding the core doctrine of who Jesus is, what the gospel is all about, of the need to trust in Jesus Christ alone.

Closing Prayer

We do it gently. We do it carefully. We trust in God's great pre-adventure. but we're called to do that. His grace is the only grace, the only hope we can have that we will do it gently. We won't get mad at him. We won't mistreat them in the process, but you'll treat them as creatures made in the image of God. But we'll also say these things are crucial for you as well as me. Well, let's pray.

Father, we thank you for your truth. We thank you for your word. We thank you that you've taught us these things this morning. We ask and pray that we would depend upon your grace, the only hope we have, because we're not naturally gentle. We either want to rip into the other person or we want to walk away and saying it's not worth it. Give us the wisdom to know when it's a foolish speculation and when it's all about those core things that are crucial to all of our lives.

We thank you for this, Lord, in Jesus' name. We pray that the message would be used by God to transform your faith in your life this week. If you'd like to get more information about us, feel free to go to the website, SharonRPC.org. We'd love to invite you to worship with us. Our worship time is 10 a.m. every Sunday at 25204 160th Avenue, Morning Sun, Iowa, 52640. May God richly bless you this week.