1 Tim 1.5-11, The Law of Love

Intro:

This is now the third message in my sermon series on the pastoral epistles.  In the previous message on 1st Timothy, some weeks ago, we considered the Pastoral Charge that Paul introduced his letter with: As I urged you upon my departure, remain in Ephesus in order that you may command certain men not to teach false doctrine….

            There is true doctrine, which is orthodoxy, and there is false doctrine, the doctrine that claims to be the doctrine of Christ but in reality it is heterodoxy.  Orthodoxy is that doctrine that was taught by our Lord and His apostles and prophets.  Heterodoxy is false doctrine. 

            Paul charged Timothy: Command certain men not to teach false doctrine, heterodoxy, any longer. 

            Have you ever noticed how the Bible portrays those who teach false doctrine? 

            In Acts 13 there was a Jew named Elymas, one of God’s covenant people, but he was a false prophet and a sorcerer.  When he opposed the truth that Paul was preaching, Paul looked him straight in the eye, and filled with the Spirit of God, he declared to him, “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right!  You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery.  Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?!  Now the hand of the Lord is against you.  You are going to be blind!”

            Paul warned the Corinthians, in 2 Cor. 11:13 that they had been accepting false apostles, deceitful workmen, masquerading as apostles of Christ.  In v. 4, he said those false teachers came with a different gospel, a different Christ, and a different spirit, and the Corinthians had blindly received what is false.

            In Gal. 1:7, he warned the Galatians that certain men had come to them to pervert the gospel of Christ.  And he pronounced a curse against those men.  He says in 1:8-9, If we, or an angel from heaven, or any man, preaches to you a gospel that is different from the gospel that you have received, let him be eternally condemned!

            In his second epistle, chapter 2, Peter writes that there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them.  Jude writes about the same kind of false teachers who have secretly slipped into the church, Jude 4, “who are godless men…they change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ, our only Sovereign and Lord.  Just as Paul commanded Timothy to command certain men to stop teaching false doctrines, Jude urges faithful men to contend earnestly against false teachers, contend earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints.

            And it is the true faith, the doctrine of the apostles and the ancient prophets, that is at stake here.  At the end of 1 Tim. 1:4, Paul says that promote controversies rather than God’s work, which is by faith. False doctrines do not promote God’s work!  Endless genealogies and myths do not promote God’s work.  No, the end result of teaching error is more error.  If the blind lead the blind, they will both fall into a ditch. 

            The work of God, which is the teaching of true doctrine, the doctrine of Christ, has a certain goal in the lives of those who hear, and that goal is, if I may be so bold as to repeat the words of our brother, love, love, love, love.

            I am thankful that he preached on this verse last week, because we cannot hear this enough times.

            The charge that Paul gave to Timothy, to remain in Ephesus and teach true doctrine, and silence those who teach false doctrine, has this goal: the maturity of love.  Paul explains that this mature love, in a mature Christian, requires three essential building blocks: a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.  Mr. Katare didn’t explain how these three things, working together, produce the godly character of love; so that is what I intend to talk about this morning.  How is love produced by a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith?  And just what is this—love—that is born out of these three essential qualities?

            First, we must understand that these three things are directly related to the teaching of sound doctrine.  Paul commands Timothy, “Stop those men who are teaching false doctrines, because they do not promote God’s work!  God’s work has a goal…”  If false doctrine does not promote that goal, then true doctrine, sound doctrine, is the way to get to the goal. 

            The false teachers don’t care about this, and the ignorant teachers do not understand this. Paul says in v. 6 that some of them wandered away from the goal.  You can imagine, a ship on a great ocean, moving forward to a distant land.  It has a goal, and the leaders of the ship, the captain, the first mate, the navigator, have to work together, focused on one thing—that all together may reach their goal.  The storms of Satan’s attacks come against them, the winds of doctrine blow hard against their progress, and they must work all the harder against that wind to keep the ship on course.  The waves of temptation and lust crash over the ship, but a good captain is like a shepherd, and he won’t let his crew be swept away by the sin that so easily entangles them.  He is always teaching them how to move about on the ship, how to avoid being swept overboard, how to make use of the lifelines, and hold on to each other in the darkness of the world.  But there were teachers in Ephesus who were teaching without any goal, without any end result in mind.  Their teaching was not to purify the heart, but to impress those who hear.  Not to make the conscience clear, but to exploit them with stories they had made up of all the people they healed, and the people they raised from the dead, like so many false teachers are doing in this generation.  Not to strengthen the sincerity of the faith of the believers, but having eyes full of adultery, to entice those who are just escaping from the errors of this world.  They turned to meaningless talk.  Empty words. We can imagine what meaningless talk should mean to us today when there are those who teach in some of the churches and in the schools that Jesus is not the only way of salvation, or that we should not say that all men are sinners…mankind is essentially good, they teach and proclaim, and so they promote the goodness of mankind, and turn aside from the work of the law, which is to convict men of their sins and drive them to Christ that they might be saved through faith in the Savior.  Instead, they turn aside to meaningless things: promoting programs in which adherents of all religions can worship God in joint worship services, or perhaps lesser things, such as dinner parties, social events, sports and games, as a replacement for the frequent gatherings of the church to continue in prayer, breaking of bread, and the apostles doctrine.  They are no longer concerned with always building up others on their most holy faith, not focused on living a life that is free from sin to maintain a clear conscience. 

            Paul knew very well what he was telling Timothy to do.  He himself had the trouble of dealing with such men.  He writes in v. 19, that some men have rejected these, some have rejected faith and a good conscience, and they have shipwrecked their faith.  Men who would be teachers of others who sank the ship!  When leaders fall, the faith and godliness of everyone suffers.  That is why every teacher shall be judged by a stricter judgment.  And Paul was harder on teachers than he was with the sheep of the flock of His master.  He writes in chap. 5:29, that when an elder sins, he must be rebuked publicly, so that the rest of the church will fear and not sin. 

In chap. 1:20, a rebuke was not enough.  These men had flat out rejected the work of God; they had turned away from faith and a good conscience.  They had rejected Christ, and were spreading blasphemous talk against the truth.  And Paul didn’t greet them with a holy kiss, or today, a holy handshake of a brother receiving a brother.  He showed them to the door, the door out of the church and out of the kingdom of heaven.  I have delivered them over to Satan, he said, so that they may be taught not to blaspheme.  Put the evil man out from among you, he commands the church in Corinth.  I have this against you, Jesus Christ warns his church, that you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who teaches and leads my bond servants to go astray into immorality and the worship of a false god.

            Timothy, command certain men not to teach false doctrines in the church!  This is the apostle’s repeated theme in this letter to Pastor Timothy, in 1 Tim. 6:3, “If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing.” 

            In chap. 1:7, Paul describes their ignorance in this way, “They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not know what they are talking about or what they so confidently affirm.”

            Now it is at this point, that you need to pay closer attention, so that you don’t miss what I’m going to explain about the remainder of these verses. 

            Many who read 1 Tim. 1 fail to see the connection between v. 5, and vv. 7ff.   After all, what does love have to do with the law of God?  There are some Christian circles where they might say that the law has nothing to do with v. 5, and so Paul completely loses them in his explanation of this.

            What does the law have to do with love?  Everything!

            What is the law of God?  Our Lord Jesus summarized the law in two commandments, and you know them very well.  Say them with me….You shall love the Lord your God….. You shall love your neighbor as yourself….  On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.  All the purpose of the law, all the meaning of the law, all the proper result of the law, is summarized by the commands to love God and love our neighbor.  Paul takes this summarization a step further, he sharpens his pencil to the sharpest and smallest point possible, and writes the purpose and meaning of the law in a single word: What is it?  Love!  Love does no harm to a neighbor.  Love, says the apostle, is the keeping of the whole law of God.  This love is the object of every law of God.  This love is the goal of the law….Do you see what I’m driving at now?

            Those who do not understand this, they want to be teachers of the law; but they can’t use the law in any meaningful way.  They don’t have the law in their hearts. 

We have a goal in the doctrine we are teaching, and only that truth that is in keeping with the goal may be taught in the church of Jesus Christ.  It is the doctrine that is according to godliness.

            We have seen the fate of those who turn aside from the goal, now let us observe the progress of those who pursue the goal.

 The Goal of the Charge: True doctrine has a goal of love

1. The Result of forsaking this Charge: False Teachers cannot teach doctrine, nor understand the law
2. The gospel and true doctrine of Christ are in harmony with the law of God—

  The implied conclusion to Timothy: you must teach the proper balance of law and gospel.

After commanding Timothy to see that only sound doctrine is taught in the church, Paul declares that the goal of this command is love from a pure heart, and a good conscience and a sincere faith.  In other words, God commands that true doctrine must be taught so that the people may learn what true love is, and in learning what it is, practice it with all their hearts and thus conform more and more to godliness.  The Holy Spirit breaks true love into three parts: the love of a pure heart, the love of a good conscience, and the love of a sincere faith.  These are qualities which are unnatural to man.  They can be gained only by learning the Word of God.  They can be established in the lives of believers only through the doctrines of Christ, and where there is not the goal of these qualities of love, where men wander from these essential goals of teaching, they turn aside to useless and meaningless talk.  Let us then, as the Lord permits, make it our goal to see that sound doctrine is taught in all the churches of Jesus Christ, always with this goal in mind, and that false doctrine, which cannot produce the fruit of the Spirit of God, finds no place to rest its foot or lay its hat or its walking cane down in our midst.  For only when we are faithful in fulfilling this task can we expect the church to remain alive into the generation that will follow us.