Sermon Tone Analysis

Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead so that we can be justified (declared righteous) in the presence of a holy God.

This is the gospel.

This is the message the Church must preach/teach/live.

The gospel (and nothing else) is the power of God that brings salvation.

The gospel (and nothing else) is our message.

>If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to 1 Timothy 1:

Before anything else happens, before Timothy does anything else, Paul urges him to:

Guard the Gospel

Paul gets right to the meat of the letter, right to the issue at hand.

He jumps right into Timothy’s pastoral assignment.

Timothy is a young pastor serving in Ephesus—a large city with a bunch of different issues facing the church there—gnosticism, paganism, pluralism.

The biggest issue facing the believers in Ephesus is false teaching, the promotion of false doctrine.

Paul is preoccupied with making sure the gospel—the good news about Jesus—is preached and that all other teaching, every different teaching (heterodidaskaleo) is guarded against.

The word there at the end of verse 3 (heterodidaskaleo) some think Paul might have coined.

He likely invented this compound word and used it to describe any teaching other than the gospel of Jesus Christ.

To translate it literally, it’s different teaching.

And any teaching in the church that is not the biblical gospel is false teaching.

So whether your Bible translation reads false doctrines, different doctrine, no other doctrine, or strange doctrine, the point is clear: any teaching that isn’t the gospel (be it gospel-lite or gospel-plus)—any teaching that isn’t the gospel is false.

In the church, there need to be different methods used throughout the ages, but the teaching must be consistent, unchanged, un-tampered with; the teaching—the only teaching—that belongs in the church is the gospel.

There’s so much teaching that can easily creep into the church without our noticing.

It might not seem like that big of a deal, but when we let our guard down, we pave the way for a lot of false teaching.

About 5-6 years ago, some of the curriculum that we ordered for our Sunday School classes turned out to be little more than moralism: “Be nice to your sister.”

“Share your toys.”

“Don’t lie.”

All of those are fine lessons, but divorced from the gospel, it’s merely behavior modification and works-based, savior-less theology.

So we trashed that curriculum (the only place for it) and started using The Gospel Project where every lesson is tied to and finds its application in the Crucified and Risen Lord.

We’ve had to scratch some special-event guest speakers due to theological liberalism and lack of Biblical orthodoxy.

The elders make sure that people who have no business speaking in our church and from our pulpit don’t.

Because the gospel’s at stake.

We have dis-invited and/or kept people from coming to speak/preach/teach here and we’ll do it again, because the gospel is too precious and because we love you too much to let you listen to garbage, to let you listen to teaching that’s different from (and therefore contrary to) the gospel.

It won’t happen.

Over our dead bodies.

When Paul writes his second letter to Timothy, he anticipates a time coming when:

This is true in every time, but certainly in ours.

There’s no end to the stories of churches who have started to cater their teaching to the culture around them, capitulating on key doctrines, vacillating between truth and error.

And boy, do they draw a crowd.

Tell people what they want to hear, eliminate any mention of sin and depravity, throw in a few programs for children and teens, and you might just end up with 15,000-20,000 people attending every week and get to build yourself an 80 million dollar sanctuary (that’s a real thing, less than 70 miles from here).

It’s so important for the pastor/elder to guard the gospel because people are so tempted turn away from the gospel.

The Church needs pastors and elders who are committed to this task.

Mark Dever (a pastor in Washington, D.C.), when asked to describe the pastor’s responsibilities, responded: “Teach and pray, love and stay.”

That’s a good summation of the pastor/elder’s calling.

Paul urges Timothy (v. 3) to stay there in Ephesus, hard as it is, as many issues as the church has, stay there and teach, commanding certain persons to stop teaching different/false doctrine.

Paul knows the church needs someone (or a group of someones) to help keep it on the right track, because false doctrines, myths, and genealogies do not advance God’s work; only the gospel does that.

If it’s not the gospel, all it amounts to meaningless talk.

The summons is clear, as David Platt puts it: “Address anything and everything that pulls people away from the gospel.”

There is so much that pulls people away from the gospel.

It can even look and sound religious.

In Timothy’s day, false teachers in Ephesus were taking extrabiblical writings (writings not in Scripture)—stories and myths about different Old Testament figures, and they were using them to add to God’s Word.

When we reach 1 Timothy 4, we’ll see that the same false teachers were teaching that you shouldn’t get married and that you shouldn’t eat certain foods.

They were putting rules and regulations on God’s people that are not found in God’s Word.

That’s always a problem.

I could point a finger at my childhood friends from fundamentalist Baptist churches and their “No dancing.

No card games.

Don’t drink, smoke, or chew or go with girls who do.”

But we aren’t without our extrabiblical rules and regulations, are we?

It’s a really good practice to sit down and list out all your beliefs, all the religious rules and regulations you observe and then open your Bible to see if there’s any biblical basis for what you believe and for how you operate.

If there’s not, stop it.

What we must never do is add to God’s law (extrabiblical myths, stories, rules, regulations) or believe that the law saves.

False teachers in Ephesus, along with others in the first century, were teaching that obedience to the law, even some extrabiblical laws, could help someone earn the favor of God.

This kind of teaching has been going on since the first century and it’s proclamation is loud and proud today.

The idea is that by doing certain works—following certain rules or certain laws—you can earn God’s favor.

This runs completely counter to the biblical gospel.

Any time we try to add to God’s gracious work in the gospel, we pervert it.

You’re not saved by grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ AND your obedience and good works.

You’re saved by grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, period.

It’s not “Gospel+”; it’s “Gospel.”

The law of God is good if one uses it properly; the law of God has a purpose: the law restrains sin (like speed limit signs; they don’t keep everyone from speeding, but they keep most people from speeding out of control most of the time).

The law is a boundary.

The law also shows God’s condemnation of the sinner; when we break the law, it becomes a testimony against us.

And the law shows God’s will for the saved, shows us how to honor God with our lives—how to love Him and our neighbor.

More than anything, though, the law, when used properly shows us that we are all in desperate need of the gospel.

The law can’t save us; in fact, it reveals how poor we truly are.

We need the gospel—the good news of what God has done in Christ.

We must guard the gospel with all we have.

We must also, alongside our guarding the gospel, take time to:

Celebrate the Gospel

Paul shares his testimony, his personal encounter with the gospel.

His is an incredible story, though no more incredible than yours.

He tells his story, what God has done in Christ, and it wells-up to triumphant praise, to a beautiful doxology.

The man who blasphemed the God of grace was met with grace from God; the persecutor of the faith was gifted faith from God; the man who was marked by violence, God showered with love.

There is something unbelievably poetic about Paul’s life.

He was this (blasphemer, persecutor, a violent man), and now, by the transforming power of the gospel, he is this (made new, redeemed, an apostle, a pastor/elder).

There’s a similar poetry to your life, Christian.

By God’s grace and mercy, you heard the gospel of Jesus Christ (the only way anyone becomes a Christian); the Holy Spirit drew you to the Lord, convicted you of sin.

You once were this; now, you are this.

There’s a very clear before-and-after in each Christian’s life.

It’s unmissable.

You have been brought from death to life.

Like Paul, you could say: The grace of our Lord was poured out on me abundantly, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.

Paul realizes he’s a sinner and celebrates the truth that Jesus saves sinners.

In one of the most succinct gospel explanations, worthy of our reflection and memorization, Paul celebrates:

Jesus came to live the life we could not live, to die the death we deserved to die, to rise in victory over enemies we could not conquer—sin and death.

There is no greater or mind-bending wonder in all of history, and yet Paul tells us this is true; it’s trustworthy and it deserves full acceptance.

There are many people who think there’s no way God would ever save them.

They say, “I’ve done too much wrong.

I’ve hated Him.

I’ve turned against Him.

I’ve fought against Him at every point in my life.”

If you think you’re beyond the mercy of God, just look at Paul: persecutor turned pastor, murderer turned missionary.

God loves you and He beckons sinners like you to believe in Him for eternal life.