How Do We Pass On a Healthy, Unified Church | 2 Timothy 2:14-19 | Pastor Dave Hentschel

All right, well, good morning, church.

Please turn with me in your Bibles to the book of 2 Timothy, and I will meet you there in a second after I talk to you about an amazing thing that happened this week.

Did anybody see the Artemis II mission and what was happening there up in the skies?

For the first time in decades, astronauts have traveled back towards the moon.

You may have also noticed astronaut Victor Glover had some spiritual things to say up there.

He's also a Christian, and he shared a reflection as he was up there looking backward toward the earth from space.

And as he was speaking, something he said to me was quite striking.

He said that from where he was, as he looked back at the earth, he saw the earth as one thing, one place, one home, one shared existence.

And though we have so many things down here that divide us, from that distance, many of those differences that seem so big to us all the time just didn't quite look the same.

If that's true of humanity as a whole, how much more true should that be of the Church of Jesus Christ?

And yet, oftentimes it feels untrue.

And why is that?

Why does the Church of Jesus Christ seem so divided?

Why is it that people who share the same Savior, who share the same scriptures, who believe the same gospel, can become so divided.

Now, to be clear, not all division is wrong.

There are some truths in Scripture that are so central, so foundational, that we have to stand firm on them and contend for that kind of truth.

But there are also so many other things that are not so much worth dividing over.

And one of the greatest challenges in the Christian life, and one of the greatest challenges of Christian leadership, one of the greatest challenges I have found as a pastor is learning to discern the difference between those two things.

That's exactly what the Paul is, the Apostle Paul is helping Timothy understand in this section.

2 Timothy 2 will be in verses 14 to 19.

The theme of this passage really has to do with conflict.

Conflict, specifically in the church, but I think you can apply it more broadly.

And we learn here that conflict in the church can go wrong in a few different ways.

We see sometimes it goes wrong through arguments about trivial things.

We see sometimes it goes wrong through careless teaching, and then we see sometimes it goes wrong through actually heresy and false teaching.

And so the title of my message today is it's all about passing on the faith to the next generation, but how do we pass on a healthy and unified church to the next generation?

Because that's what we really want to do.

And in this passage, we're gonna learn three things, three very practical, very relevant things.

First, we're gonna learn what not to fight about.

Then we're gonna learn what we must fight about, and then the million-dollar question, we're gonna learn about how to tell the difference between those two things.

That's really what we're talking about here today.

Um, what hills to die on, what hills not to die on, and how do you tell the difference between those two?

Uh, before we dive in, let's let's ask for the Lord's help.

Would you would you pray with me one more time?

Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning with a grateful heart.

What a beautiful day you've given us, what a beautiful church you've given us, what a beautiful body we have here.

Thank you for the privilege of serving you.

Thank you for the privilege of gathering with your people.

Thank you for your the Lord's day.

Thank you for the gift of your word, which is living and active and able to guide us in all truth.

So as we open up this ancient letter as a part of the scriptures, we would ask that you'd quiet our hearts now and focus our minds and guard us from quarrels in our lives that don't honor you and from anything that would distract us from your calling and the truth of the gospel.

And I just want to ask that your Holy Spirit would help us to rightly understand your word, give us wisdom to know the difference between what truly matters and what really doesn't matter.

And would you shape us into a church and into people who love truth but also pursue unity and live in a way that honors you.

And so may your word really take root in our hearts, in our church, and bear fruit in our lives.

For we pray it all for Jesus' sake and his reputation.

And everyone said, Amen, amen.

If you're ready for God's word, let's look at verse 14.

Together, Paul starts like this He says, Timothy, remind them of these things and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers.

Pause here for a second.

What we have here in this first verse is a solemn charge, a serious oath.

Paul is invoking the very presence of God that Timothy is to give.

And the first thing that Paul says here to Timothy is that he wants Timothy to remind them of some things.

The term remind them is found in the present continuous tense, which means he needs to keep on reminding them of these things because sometimes we forget, especially in the midst of suffering, which this letter is talking about, a context of suffering, we tend to forget some things.

So Paul says, I want you to remind them of these things.

Now, what things?

Well, the these things that he's talking about is the creed that we just read last week from the few verses earlier in this letter.

The creed that was a poem that the early church would recite.

You remember that poem that we read last week.

You can see it there in your Bibles.

These things are the essential truths of our faith.

The gospel that's been outlined in this letter so far.

Remind them of these things, Timothy.

Now, who's them?

Well, them is most likely the teachers that were referred to back in chapter 2, verses 1 and 2.

You remember Paul said, Timothy, take these things you've heard from me and entrust them to faithful men who will be able to teach others.

That's who Timothy is supposed to remind.

Remind them of these things, and I want you to solemnly charge them to not quarrel about words.

Literally, in the original, what that term says is word wars.

Don't get engaged in word wars.

And so what we have here in our text is actually a contrast between word quarrelers and true teachers or literally truth teachers in our text.

But this is a problem that occurs.

And it's not a problem that occurs outside the church, like the persecution Paul is experiencing.

This is a problem that occurs inside the church that he needs to address.

Because churches are rarely destroyed because of persecution on the outside.

Actually, Tertullian famously said the blood of the martyrs is like seed.

It's like the seed of the church.

Actually, most churches struggle with problems that come from confusion on the inside of the church.

Now, what are these quarrels about words?

What are these word wars that's being discussed here?

What is that?

Well, what at what that is, is focusing on things in the church that are more peripheral, things in the church that are not essential.

Paul says, do not do that, do not focus there.

Why?

Because it's no good.

Literally, the term there is useless.

It is useless.

Timothy, it's a complete waste of your time, it's a waste of your breath, it's a waste of your energy.

It is no good.

And more importantly, he says it ruins your hearers.

Literally, the term for ruins here is the Greek term for catastrophe.

It will create a catastrophe.

The catastrophe word is a compound word made up of two words, troph, which means to turn, and then kata means upside down.

So to turn upside down, that's what a catastrophe is.

When it gets turned upside down.

Timothy, if you do this, if you focus on word quarreling, that will lead to catastrophe.

You will turn this church upside down.

Now let me introduce you to a concept perhaps you're not familiar with called gray areas.

A gray area is a spiritual issue that leaves room for legitimate differences of opinion based on sound biblical interpretation.

Gray areas are also known as secondary issues or areas of liberty, lesser things, non-essentials, tertiary items, disputable matters, lower tier, tier three, peripheral issues.

I'll give you some examples of gray issues that can come up in the context of a local church.

And you need to buckle your seatbelts for this one.

Back in the early church, would you believe there was great debate about eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols?

There was also great debate about holidays.

They had a big disagreement about the date of Easter.

In the first few hundred years, one of the major conflicts that arose in the church was a conflict about predestination and free will.

And Augustine had it out with Pelagius.

The great schism of the church between the East and West of 1054 was about the procession of the Holy Spirit.

Did the Spirit come from the Father or from the Father and the Son?

The church split in half over that issue.

Then came the Reformation.

The church split again.

Now, some issues in the Reformation were definitely worth contending for.

And other disagreements that came up in the Reformation, well, they seem a little bit more trivial looking back on them from our perspective.

If you study Calvin and the city that he founded in Geneva, Calvin's Geneva had a lot of laws.

Calvin's Geneva had standards, and he took stands against many things.

He took a stand against all dancing.

He took a stand against all religious pictures and relics.

He took a stand against church bells.

He took a stand against any altar candles.

He even took a stand against naming your child a name that's not a biblical name.

That was against the law.

So Calvin's Geneva had a lot of gray areas that they were taking stands on.

Fast forward to the 1700s, there was great debate about the use of instruments in the church.

The organ was a scandal when that was introduced.

Isaac Watts, many of whose hymns we love and enjoy today, someone we would never think of as progressive, was cutting edge.

Many people thought you should only sing the psalms in church.

You fast forward to our modern era.

In the 1960s, there was great debate about whether Christians could listen to rock and roll music on the radio.

In the 1980s, there was debate about Christian heavy metal and whether that was appropriate.

In the 1990s, there was debate about Christians and reading fantasy series like Harry Potter.

Today there are disagreements about parenting philosophies, which schools to choose for your children, public, private, homeschool.

There are disagreements about the Christian and our relationship with alcohol, total abstinence or moderation.

There are tons of disagreements about end times.

Are you premillennial, amillennial, postmillennial, panmillennial?

Will it all pan out in the end?

Do you believe in a rapture?

When will the rapture take place?

Covenant theology, dispensationalism?

What's your position on Israel?

Should we unconditionally support the state of Israel as God's chosen people?

Or is there room for legitimate critique there?

Lots of disagreements about end times.

People disagree about counseling.

Should we exclusively use biblical counseling, or is it okay to have an integrative model of counseling?

Is it okay for a Christian to take psychiatric medicine, or does that violate the principle of the sufficiency of Scripture?

And what about holidays?

Are we allowed to celebrate things like Halloween?

Can we send our kids trick-or-treening?

What about things like Christmas trees and Santa?

Are we allowed to participate in those things?

What about the Easter bunny?

Does that violate someone's strong conviction there?

Then we like to discuss charismatic gifts with great fervency.

There are different views on tongues for today or healing or the gift of prophecy.

Are they for today in a continual sense or have they ceased?

There's different disagreements about church governance models.

Should we have elders?

Should we be a congregational government?

Should we have a bishop?

Is that a biblical role?

And then there's disagreements about creation.

How did creation occur?

Are you a young earth person?

Are you an old earth person?

Are you a theistic evolution person?

There's disagreements about the Sabbath.

Are we allowed to work on the Sabbath?

Are we allowed to recreate on the Sabbath?

Are we allowed to, let's say, for example, have our kids participate in sports on Sundays?

Are we allowed to watch an NFL game on Sundays?

Where do we draw the line there?

There are disagreements and get your hard hats on this one about music and worship.

I know you could have never guessed that.

We have the hand raisers and the non-handraisers.

I think we should have different sections for the hand raisers and the non-handraisers.

We have disagreements about volume.

Is the volume too high?

Is the volume too low?

Believe it or not, I've received anonymous scathing criticisms just about this one particular issue.

I mean, the way people write about these things to me is like with the tone of an apocalyptic uh end times catastrophe.

People are passionate about volume, and they are equally passionate about the style of music.

Should we use traditional hymns?

Should we have contemporary music?

Should we try to blend the style and make everyone unhappy every single week, like the grumbling Israelites?

You should read the emails we get about this one.

I mean, not just opinions, moral, right and wrong.

And then there's the lyrics of the worship music.

There have been scathing articles about lyrics like David Crowder's sloppy wet kiss lyric, or the lyrics to reckless love.

These phrases generated much angst in the church today.

And how about clapping during music?

Does that steal away God's glory, or is it appropriate and even biblical to clap your hands from time to time as a posture of worship?

And what about the worship team?

What are they allowed to do?

Are they allowed to transition off the stage during the pastoral prayer, or is that some kind of unholy type of gesture?

Can there be music played softly underneath of the pastor when he prays?

And how about the lighting?

Should it be joyful and bright or should it be dark and contemplative?

How about the meet and greet time?

Does that have to be every single Sunday?

Is that an essential part of each service?

And how about the regulative principle?

The principle of the regulative principle principle says Christians should only follow worship practices explicitly prescribed in the New Testament, as opposed to others who say there's freedom to practice anything that's not prohibited in the New Testament.

There's different opinions about that.

There's different opinions about prayers.

Are we allowed to use a prescripted, written-out prayer in advance?

Or does it have to always be extemporaneous prayers?

And what about Bible versions?

You should see the passion people talk about Bible versions.

There's ESV, there's NIV, there's the King James only person.

You have to use word-for-word translations.

No, it's okay to use a paraphrase sometimes, like the message.

There's a lot of passion about this.

And then how about the sermon?

Man, you might not like this sermon very much, but how long should the sermon be?

Should it be 15 minutes?

Should it be 45 minutes?

Is this an area of freedom that there's a right length here?

Or are we quenching the Holy Spirit by watching the clock instead of listening to the sermon?

And what about Christocentric preaching?

Does the gospel have to be touched into every single sermon, or is there freedom there?

How about the Lord's table?

Should we celebrate the Lord's table every single Sunday as often as you gather?

Or is once a month sufficient, like we practice here?

Or should we do it less frequently, like every quarter?

Or is that not frequent enough?

Now let's get really serious.

How about the dress code, particularly of the pastor?

What should the pastor wear?

What is the appropriate attire?

And how about the other people on the stage, like the musicians?

What should they wear?

My position when it comes to clothes may differ from yours, or you may feel great freedom in this area.

One person said to me one time, my position on the pastor and his clothing is yes, absolutely.

I think the pastor should definitely wear clothing, and I will not budge on that.

That's a good idea.

I could keep going on and on and on, but let me just ask you a true or false question.

Christians like to fight.

True or false?

That's true.

Everybody likes to fight.

Christians are no exception.

I hate to admit it, I like to fight.

This is mostly true.

And my experience as a pastor over a couple decades is that gray areas are the most flammable fuel for the fire in these fights.

Differences in gray areas are the leading cause of church conflict.

And the second is like not even close, not even off the on the charts.

It is the leading cause of church conflicts.

Gray areas.

And it never ceases to amaze me how worked up people get over these gray areas that are areas of disagreement.

And what's kind of disturbing is the energy people have around their opinions about these things.

Their energy just seems so disproportional to the importance of what they're talking about.

Now, don't get me wrong, gray areas are not unimportant issues.

You may have an opinion on a gray area, that's fine.

You might even have a strong opinion about a gray area, that's okay.

But the encouragement, I think, from God's word today, from chapter 2, verse 14, is that we shouldn't quarrel about these things.

Meaning we shouldn't elevate our opinion about these things to the moral level of right or wrong.

I have it this way, I know it the right way, everybody else is doing it the wrong way.

When we elevate a gray area and our opinion about that to the level of right and wrong, we're now being divisive in the body of Christ, and that's a problem.

You need to be more flexible.

In fact, you need to leave room for maximum flexibility about your convictions regarding these things so that you don't lead to disunity in the church with those who may disagree with you in a legitimate sense.

Now, what when we do that, sometimes it feels so right.

When we fight about these things, it feels so right.

And we think we're fighting the good fight, but we're actually doing the devil's bidding, and it's discouraging.

Just to give you exhibit A, let me remind you of how divided we got six years ago in the church at large over COVID and the pandemic.

So many gray areas came to the surface here.

Like, should we wear masks or no masks?

Is the six-foot rule a legitimate scientific principle?

Should we get the vaccine or is there vaccine hesitancy?

Is that okay?

Can we pass offering plates?

Is it okay to pass the communion kit?

Can we move church online?

There were disagreements about so many things: plexiglass, pew spacing, kids going back to school.

We debated, we argued, we grumbled.

Some people divided everybody into two categories.

Suddenly wearing a mask became a test of Christian faithfulness.

Some Christians saw compliance with the CDC rules as a demonstration of loving your neighbor, whereas other Christians saw those ever-changing CDC rules for churches as an example of government overreach, which should be questioned.

I could go on and on and on here, but you remember the kind of gray areas that were coming to the surface a few years ago.

It really was almost endless.

The answers to those questions are not as clear as you might think.

There are legitimate opinions on all sides.

It's very difficult for a church who faces something like that to maintain unity.

And the question is, how?

How does a church maintain unity in the midst of those kinds of circumstances?

How do we fight for unity?

Well, Paul would say something very simple.

Here's the deal.

Don't turn gray areas into gospel issues.

Don't do that.

Accept those who may disagree with you and have a different opinion than you do on those things.

See, the temptation for the person who has a very strict conscience and a strict opinion about a gray area is to judge someone who doesn't agree with them and to look down on them, in a sense, to condemn them.

And then the temptation for the other person who feels a little bit more of a liberty in their conscience on that issue is to ridicule the person who feels a little bit more strict.

Say, what are you so uptight about?

Paul looks at both of those people and says, You're both equally wrong.

You need to accept one another just as God in Christ has accepted you.

There are legitimate differences of opinion.

You need to find a way to maintain unity even though you disagree about that, because your unity is in Christ.

This is exactly what Jesus is calling us to do.

Jesus says to love one another.

The Bible does not say be of one mind except in the area of worship music, except in the area of politics, except when there's a pandemic.

If that happens, you don't need to be of one mind.

You can resist your neighbor and ridicule them and rebuke your friends until they see the light like you do.

No.

We are to choose to love, even though we disagree or have a difference of opinion.

There are no exceptions to that.

When we divide over gray areas, areas of a legitimate difference of opinion.

Peter Pendell used to say, the world laughs, the enemy rejoices, we hurt, and God weeps.

This is not good.

And I imagine Jesus himself saying, Do not split my church, do not destroy my bride whom I love.

Why?

Because our unity proves that the gospel actually works.

Friends, the stakes are really high on this.

If we can't find unity inside the church, we're not going to have credibility outside the church.

So we have to take this topic really seriously.

To help us here, let Call my chancellor up to the witness stand, Chuck Swindah.

This Swindall quote is long, but it's worth paying close attention to.

He writes this in his book, Grace Awakening.

He says, quote, one of the marks of maturity is the ability to disagree without becoming disagreeable.

That takes grace.

In fact, handling disagreements, he goes on to say, with tact, is one of the crowning achievements of grace.

Unfortunately, the older we get, the more brittle we become in our reactions, the more tedious and stubborn and fragile.

For some strange reason, Swindah says this is especially true among evangelical Christians.

He goes on to say, you would think that the church would be the one place where we could find tolerance, tact, plenty of room for disagreement and open discussion.

Not so.

It is a rare delight, Swindah says, to come across those in the family of God who have grown old in grace as well as in knowledge.

Many a ministry lives on the edge of upheaval, he says, of borderline controversy, simply because there's no room for disagreement, no freedom to negotiate, no open ear to those who hold a different opinion.

That is sad.

But biblical unity is not the same as uniformity.

We're not one because we're the same.

Biblical unity is born from different opinions of diverse people about disparate issues because we are one in the gospel and one in Christ and one in the Spirit.

Biblical unity is a much deeper unity than us agreeing on every single gray issue.

Now, if we don't get this right, Paul says, you're headed for catastrophe.

I don't want to understate what he's saying here because he is speaking in very strong language.

Gray issues are important.

They're not unimportant, they're just not that important.

They should never cause us to break fellowship with another brother or sister in Christ.

As an example.

Let me share about two great evangelists of the 1700s.

John Wesley and George Whitfield were part of the first Great Awakening in America.

They both preached to thousands and saw so many people converted under their ministries.

These two men of God disagreed about predestination.

Whitfield was very Calvinistic.

Wesley rejected that doctrine.

And their followers knew that, and their followers argued fiercely about that.

At one point, someone actually approached John Wesley and said, Mr.

Wesley, you and George Whitfield disagree on the topic of predestination.

Do you think you're going to see George Whitfield in heaven?

And Wesley replied, no.

And then he paused for five seconds.

And he said, Because I think he's going to be so close to the throne of God, and I will be so far that I'll hardly catch a glimpse of him.

That's the spirit of brothers in Christ who don't agree about a gray area.

Don't divide the body of Christ over non-essentials.

That's the body that Christ died to unite.

If you'd like to learn more about the topic of handling gray areas in the church, my friend Craig wrote a book called Gray Church.

It's full of wisdom and practical examples of how to deal with this topic, and I found it greatly helpful in preparing this message for today.

So Paul says, Timothy, don't do the word quarreling thing.

Don't let unnecessary divisions creep in.

As a leader, quarantine those types of debates.

But focus on something else instead, because avoiding foolish debates is only half the job.

It's not enough to just say what a church must not do.

We also have to talk about what a church must do, right?

So that's point two.

We've talked about what we should not fight about, but now let's talk about what we should fight about.

And for this, drop down with me to verse 16.

I'll come back to 15 in just a second.

Paul goes on to say this but avoid irreverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness, and their talk will spread like gangrene.

Among them are Himenaeus and Philetus, who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened.

They are upsetting the faith of some.

Strong language here.

This false teaching Paul is talking about, he likens to a virus.

A theological virus has crept in.

It's like an infectious, spreading, dangerous disease.

Let me show you a picture, and as a warning, the picture's a little disturbing.

But Paul likens this false teaching to gangrene.

Those of you in the medical profession, you know how serious this is and how it needs to be dealt with severely.

It's a kind of a blood poisoning.

Now that's a terrifying image.

In the ancient world, in fact, if gangrene were to set in, it would spread throughout your whole body and eventually kill you.

And the only way to stop it was radical action.

You had to remove the infected tissue before it spread.

Let me get that nasty picture off there and go back to the verse.

Paul is saying false teaching is that serious.

It is infecting the body of Christ.

It needs to be severed out.

It is not healthy.

It's dangerous.

In fact, it's deadly.

But this kind of false teaching rarely ever announces itself.

You know, wolves don't come to the front and say, hey, I'm a wolf.

Heresy never comes into a church that way.

Rather, it usually comes in quietly, it usually comes in nuanced and sophisticated.

It sounds thoughtful, but you recognize it departs from the truth in some very important way.

And when it does that, it starts to spread slowly like a spiritual disease.

And then it brings havoc.

So this is why Paul actually names these false teachers.

Who's spreading this theological error?

He says, well, it's Hemenaeus and Philetus.

Paul names them.

No, this isn't personal hostility, this is spiritual triage.

There were teachers in this church who were denying the future bodily resurrection for the saints.

They said, Oh, that's already happened.

It's all spiritual.

It's already all taken place.

You've been resurrected.

Now, why did they teach this?

It may be that the teachers were making Christianity more palatable to those who maybe struggled with the doctrine of the resurrection, which were many in the first century.

And to accommodate them, they left off a foundational belief of Christianity.

And Paul says, when they did that, they swerved.

They got off the road.

They literally missed the mark.

And when they did that, this is dishonoring to God.

It is irreverent, and it is harmful to the body of Christ.

Because why?

These are matters of great significance.

The resurrection, that's unsettling.

And what Paul actually says, yes, they are upsetting some people's faith.

Why?

Because the Bible clearly teaches this.

It doesn't just teach about the immortality of the soul, it also promises the resurrection of the body.

This is our great hope, and this doctrine is not third tier, it's essential.

So Paul says, do not let that disease spread any further.

Timothy, when you practice theological medicine, make sure you're all scrubbed up and kept pure.

We don't want any infections coming into the body of Christ like that.

And so the second principle here in our text is kind of the opposite.

We just learned we should not fight over things that aren't worth fighting for.

But Paul also says we should fight over things that are worth fighting for.

Now, this could be kind of confusing.

At this point, let me introduce you to a framework that will give us some categories to work with.

And some of you have seen this before, but it's worth repeating.

I call it the three buckets.

The three buckets.

There are three buckets, and the first bucket we're going to call cardinal doctrines.

Can you say that with me?

Cardinal doctrines.

In terms of a definition, a cardinal doctrine is a doctrine that is essential to the Christian faith.

Theologians Grenz and Olsen write, quote, a belief is considered cardinal if it seems essential to the gospel.

In other words, if its denial would entail apostasy, rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In other words, if you don't hold to the resurrection, if you don't hold to a cardinal doctrine, you're probably not a Christian and you're teaching heresy.

That's how central these doctrines are to our faith.

If someone knowingly rejects a cardinal doctrine, they're moving outside historic Christian belief.

These are high-stakes beliefs.

The resurrection is in this category.

Now, there are not very many issues that are cardinal in nature.

Most theologians have maybe a dozen of them or so.

A few examples of cardinal doctrines would be like the Trinity, the deity of Jesus Christ, the authority of Scripture, justification by faith, the bodily resurrection, the return of Jesus.

Those would all be examples of cardinal doctrines.

If you want to know what cardinal doctrines we hold to here, the membership class will tell you all about that.

We'll cover it later this month.

Now, for cardinal doctrines, I want to give you a key word.

The key word I want you to remember when it comes to this bucket is fight.

When it comes to cardinal doctrines, they are worth you fighting for them.

They are worth preserving.

You dare not give up on a cardinal doctrine.

You hold your ground on cardinal doctrines.

Why?

One theologian put it this way: quote, beliefs that are at odds with Orthodox Christian theology are a direct threat to the basic beliefs necessary for adequately understanding God's plan for personal salvation.

If a church gives up its cardinal doctrines, that church is slowly in decline.

There's not much faith to pass on to the next generation.

And so this is why the Bible says you're to contend for the faith, Jude chapter 1.

Jude 1 · chapter mention

This is why we must pass the baton of the faith delivered to us by the apostles, and each generation must do this.

The danger here, if you give up on a cardinal doctrine, is the danger of heresy.

It's the danger of false teaching.

You are now outside of Christianity.

That's a huge problem.

Bucket number two.

The second bucket that you need to be aware of is the bucket that I'll just call clear Bible teaching.

Now, this bucket is a little bigger than the cardinal doctrine bucket.

There are many more issues that fall into the bucket of clear Bible teaching.

For example, um, well, before I get to the example, you might you might not like what the scripture says about an issue, but it's clearly taught in the Bible and it's hard to get around.

So the key word when it comes to clear Bible teaching is the word obey.

Obey.

For example, Paul says in Ephesians chapter 5, do not get drunk with wine.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

If you ask me what you should do regarding the issue of intoxication, I'm gonna say, you should obey the Bible.

It's really clear in the Bible.

You might not like it, but it is nevertheless clearly taught, and it's hard to deny the Bible's insistence that we should not be drunk with alcohol.

Other examples would be like, do not lie, do not be unequally yoked with a non-Christian in marriage, do not divorce under certain, except for under certain specific biblical exceptions.

Children, obey your parents.

We could probably throw into the clear Bible teaching all ten of the Ten Commandments, as well as hundreds of other clear statements in the Bible that have prohibitions or commands for the believer.

Clear Bible teaching.

It's the danger of saying, hey, you say you're a Christian, but you clearly are not living your life as if you believe any of this stuff.

You're not obedient to what God says you should be doing.

You're saying one thing, you're doing another thing.

It's like you're wearing a mask, it's like you're two different people, it's like you're a hypocrite.

So that's the danger if we get this bucket wrong.

The third bucket we've already covered, and it's that bucket of gray areas.

This is what we've been talking about earlier.

Areas that leave room for legitimate differences of opinion based on a sound biblical interpretation.

Now, the key word that you need to remember for this bucket is the word accept.

You need to learn to accept your brother or sister in Christ who disagrees with you, because your opinion is not necessarily the right way.

You may think it is, but there are legitimate differences of opinion.

So don't judge them, nor should you ridicule them.

Rather, the Apostle Paul says in Romans 14 and 15, accept your brother in Christ who disagrees with you about this, just as God in Christ has accepted you.

Now the danger here, if we get the gray area bucket wrong, is the danger of legalism.

Legalism is when I add my rules to your life.

Legalism is when I say, I think what I think about this matter should be imposed on you.

Legalism is when we add to the word of God our own traditions or the opinions of human beings.

And Jesus had a lot to say about legalism, and none of it was good.

This is what Paul is talking about here.

So a cardinal doctrine is a doctrine for which we need to contend and fight.

And that is gonna take some backbone on your part, especially in a day like today.

But it's what we're called to do.

Al Moeller said it this way: when a leader walks into the room, a passion for truth better enter with him.

It's gonna take some resolve to fight for the cardinal doctrines.

We must fight for them.

But, but, however, please hear this next part.

You can fight in a spirit of love.

You can fight in a spirit of gentleness.

You can stand firm for things in such a way that still seeks to persuade others, not antagonize them.

That probably means you need to stay away from debates on social media when you're talking about these topics.

That probably means you're not getting in a text war about this.

That probably means email's not the best venue to fight about cardinal doctrines.

These are face-to-face, serious conversations.

I'll give you an example of someone who really struggled with this.

John Calvin.

He was a reformer in Geneva over in Switzerland, and he had a comrade.

His name was William Farrell.

Yes, Will Farrell, not the same Will Farrell.

William Farrell.

William Farrell was an outspoken and hot-headed man.

Because of his temperament, John Calvin wrote Farrell a letter in which he urged Farrell to please do more to accommodate people and seek to persuade them and win them over.

But you see, the ferrils of this world believe any effort to be judicious and prudent is being a cowardly sellout.

But Calvin wisely recognized that his friend's constant, intemperate denunciations often stemmed not from selfless courage, but rather from the opposite, ugly pride.

Writing about Pharaoh, Calvin said this.

Friends, it's possible to seek to be winsome and persuasive and still stand firm for your convictions in a way that does not unnecessarily harden or antagonize the person who's disagreeing with you.

We're seeking to win them, right?

Not get rid of them.

For me, one way I try to make sure I do this is I pause to pray for the person that I disagree with.

And that puts my heart in a better place to have a conversation.

And it stirs up my own love for them.

John Newton, the guy who was a slave trader and wrote Amazing Grace after he became a Christian, said this.

Newton said, What will it profit a man if he gains his cause and silences his adversary?

If at the same time he loses that humble, tender frame of spirit in which the Lord delights and to which the promise of his presence is made.

The answer is you gain nothing.

1 Corinthians 13 says, If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but don't have love, I'm a resounding gong, I'm a clanging cymbal.

Even when we stand firm on our convictions, and we should, we must remember the example of the Lord Jesus Christ, about whom it says in 1 Peter 2, when he was reviled, he reviled not again.

And when he suffered, he threatened not.

So we fight, yes, but we always fight with gentleness and respect.

We speak the truth, but we do so in love.

Amen.

So we've seen what not to fight about, and we've seen what to fight about.

And here's the$50 million question.

How do you know the difference?

How do you know the difference between those two categories?

That's a trick, right?

Well, sandwich right in the middle of this section, I think, is the answer.

Look with me at verse 15.

Paul's instructions are as follows 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.

That verse assumes there's a right way to interpret the Bible, and there's a wrong way to interpret the Bible.

The Bible is a powerful book, and it can be misused, and it can be perverted, and it can be abused.

Almost every major heresy throughout church history has not come from avoiding the scriptures, but misinterpreting the scriptures.

So this question here is about biblical hermeneutics, a big word that just means the science of interpreting the Bible.

And there's a right way to do it, and there's a wrong way to do it.

And the stakes could not be higher because a wrong interpretation leads to a wrong application.

This is why there's greater accountability for teachers of the Bible.

So let's unpack this verse a little bit and apply it to all of us.

First, Paul says this do your best.

Some translations say be diligent, meaning this takes work to be approved, to present yourself to God.

This is who you're serving, right?

When you study the Bible, you're not serving other people.

You account, you're accountable to God.

You work for Him as one approved.

That word approved there was used in the metal trade of proving silver or gold as a precious metal.

One who receives approval.

It was the great missionary Jim Elliott as he was studying to go to Ecuador for which he would lose his life, who said, I'm studying for the Aug degree, the approved unto God degree.

This is how we must study the scriptures as a workman, meaning this is hard.

Remember earlier in chapter two?

It's like being a soldier, it's like being an athlete, it's like being a farmer.

This is gonna be hard.

Why?

So that you don't need to be ashamed.

There is a way to handle the Bible that is shameful.

Paul says, I want you to rightly handle the word of truth.

Literally, that term rightly handle means cut it straight.

Cut it straight.

It came from the blue-collar context.

It literally means to cut a straight path.

It was used of engineers building a road through difficult terrain.

If you've ever watched highway construction through mountains, you'll see massive machines cutting through rock, clearing trees, leveling the ground, cutting it straight so that it'll go straight to the destination.

That's exactly what faithful Bible exposition seeks to do.

It clears away confusion, it clears away opinions, it clears away speculations so that people can travel directly from the text of Scripture to the truth that God intends them to apply in their own lives.

The Bible teacher's job is not to invent messages, the pastor's job is to cut a clear path through the text so that people can arrive at the truth.

Part of rightly handling or rightly dividing is rightly dividing what areas are cardinal doctrines, what areas are clear Bible teaching, and what areas are gray areas.

And when you rightly handle the word of truth, you can discern between those three buckets and you can learn how to apply this text.

So Paul says, Timothy, do this, you won't be ashamed, because you're rightly handling the word of truth.

And that's what the Bible is.

It is the word of truth, and that's how you need to treat it when you read it, Timothy.

It's the inspired revelation of Almighty God.

It's not a book of man, it is inerrant, it's infallible, and it is true.

The grass withers, the flowers fade, the word of our God stands forever.

Treat it as the word of truth, as one who's approved unto God, who doesn't need to be ashamed.

We'll talk more about the scriptures in chapter three when we get to verse 16.

But this is what Christian leaders wield, the truth.

And that's what the church needs.

To faithfully pass on a healthy, unified church to the next generation.

It needs teachers who study the Bible with great diligence, which seems like a no-brainer.

But there are many teachers and pastors today who maybe you'll have a hard time believing this, but actually deliver sermons in churches without much study of the Bible at all.

Like they're just extemporaneous TED Talks.

It's it's uh whatever they're thinking about that week or whatever's in the news or whatever their own.

Hobby horse is like a stream of consciousness.

Careful exposition of the word of God takes hard work.

This is why every single week we say, please take out your Bible and turn to this page.

We want you to see that the sermons are rooted right there in the text.

It's not coming from us.

This is coming from God.

You don't need to hear from me.

You need to hear from Him every week.

We bring the Word of truth the best we possibly can.

Not perfectly, but this is the goal.

This is the aim.

This is what moves people towards godliness, the word of truth.

And how do we tell the difference about what to fight about and what not to fight about?

By rightly handling the word of truth.

As we read this passage, you begin to feel a weight, right?

You feel the weight of this problem.

You see the false teaching could be spreading, arguments could be dividing these churches.

People sometimes drift from the truth.

But I want you to see that Paul ends this section with a word of great confidence.

So finish the passage with me by looking at verse 19.

Paul ends by saying this: 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.

In other words, Paul says the church ultimately does not depend on human leaders, it rests actually on the sovereign knowledge of God.

God has laid a firm foundation for his church of Christian doctrine that Christians can stand on.

That quotation that he gives here, the Lord knows those who are his, comes from the book of Numbers.

The context there was something called Korah's Rebellion, where the people of God rebelled against Moses and God's appointed leadership.

And as a result, they were judged by God for that.

The earth actually swallowed them up and fire came down from heaven.

It was a wicked story.

The point is, Paul's saying you shouldn't rebel against God's appointed leadership in any generation, like Hymeneus and like Philetus are doing.

Paul is charging Timothy and the church to stay faithful to God's appointed apostolic leadership in the church who stand on this solid foundation of sound doctrine.

That means the church is not fragile in the hands of God, but it also means something else.

Those who belong to Christ must live like they belong to Christ.

That leads to his second quotation.

Let everyone who names the name of the Lord depart from iniquity.

That quotation comes from Isaiah chapter 26.

Isaiah 26 · chapter mention

In Isaiah's day, that was a call to righteous living as opposed to those who were idolatrous and wayward.

This is what true believers are to do, those who are sealed.

This refers to the marking out by God of his property, under his protection, under his provision.

They should depart from iniquity, abstain from wickedness, abstain from evil, obey clear Bible teaching.

This is the calling of the church.

It's very clear.

The world out there knows how to divide, don't they?

We have a way to unite.

We have an opportunity to show them something totally different.

We here in the body of Christ know how to be unified because God is one.

And we know how to be holy because God is holy, and we are to reflect our Creator.

By doing this, the church will be strengthened and believers will grow in holiness and Christ will be honored.

Friends, the heart of this passage is that the Apostle Paul is trying to protect two things.

He's trying to protect the unity of the church, and he's trying to protect the truth.

And they're both really important to pass on a church to the next generation.

A church without truth is compromised.

It's not worth passing down.

And a church without unity, it's a catastrophe.

The church needs both.

And so Paul's heart to Timothy is saying, create a church like this.

And my heart, as one of the pastors here, one of the shepherds here, is I would like to create a church like this too.

A church that is both full of grace and truth, that's both unified and sound in its doctrine.

The key is knowing what battles to fight and what battles not to fight.

So if I could sum up the passage, what Paul is teaching here is pretty simple.

It's this a healthy, unified church knows three things.

What not to fight about, what we must fight for, and how to tell the difference.

That's how you pass on.

A healthy, unified church.

So as we apply this passage to our own lives and our own hearts, I would ask you to allow the Spirit to search you and ask yourself some questions.

Are there some things that maybe you've been quarreling about that aren't really worth quarreling about?

Are there some gray areas that you've been fighting for that maybe you need to back up on and let other people disagree about?

Maybe you need to hold those things more loosely and leave room for your brother or sister?

Maybe God is inviting you to take a little bit more of a humble posture on those things.

On the other hand, maybe you're here and there's some things that are clearly worth fighting for, and you haven't really been willing to fight for them.

You've been compromising on them.

Maybe there's some cardinal doctrines that you've really not been holding to, and it's time for you to take a firmer stand for the faith, lest that false teaching spread like gangrene.

And maybe for you it just means I need to learn to stand firm on this issue because it's really clear.

Whatever the Lord is speaking to you, I encourage you to obey how the Spirit might apply this in your own life.

But this is what it means to pass on a church healthy and unified to the next generation.

There's an old quote, some say it's Augustine, some say it's someone else, that kind of summarizes it really well.

In essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, and in all things, charity.

As we close, think back again about what Victor Glover said as he looked from the perspective of the moon back to the earth.

He said from that distance that it looked like one thing: one place, one home, one shared existence.

In a much deeper way, we are to see the Church of Jesus Christ in that fashion.

One body, one faith, one Lord.

But that kind of unity never happens by accident.

It is intentional.

It doesn't happen by ignoring the truth.

It doesn't happen by fighting over everything.

It happens when we learn to do what Paul said to Timothy to do.

Not to quarrel about what doesn't matter, learn to fight for what does matter, and learn the difference by rightly handling the word of truth.

In that way, we don't just become one thing in the universe in a vague sense.

We become one people built on God's one foundation.

Amen.

Let me invite the worship team to come as we pray together as I close.

Would you pray with me?

Heavenly Father, thank you for the truth of your word and for the reminder that your firm foundation stands.

Thank you that your church is not built on human wisdom or human strength, but on the unchanging truths of the gospel.

And Lord, help us now to take those truths with us as we leave today and guard our hearts from any unnecessary arguments and quarrels over things that, in the grand scheme of things, don't really matter.

Give us a spirit of humility and grace toward one another, especially where sincere believers might disagree.

At the same time, I pray that you'd give us courage and conviction to stand firm for the essential truths of the faith.

Help us to contend for the gospel faithfully while we do so with gentleness and respect.

And would you make us into a church that handles your word accurately, that loves one another deeply, and that passes on the faith faithfully to the next generation?

For we ask it all in the strong name of Jesus, and we pray for his reputation.

And everyone said,