Show Notes
February 15, 2026 "Rebuke Them" Titus 1:10-14
Pastor Stephen Lauer
View Full Transcript
Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Lord Jesus, you have the words of eternal life. To whom else can we turn?
[00:00:10] We turn to you. And we ask, Lord Jesus, that by your spirit you would teach our hearts the things that we need to know.
[00:00:18] We confess that because of our sinfulness, our sinful desires and our weak minds, we are very prone to being deceived.
[00:00:29] All week long the world screams at us, shouts at us in all sorts of ways, seeking to lead us astray, and our hearts desperately want to follow.
[00:00:41] Please, Lord Jesus, show us the way of truth, the way of life, that we would come near to you, cling to you, that our hearts would receive you, and that holding tightly to you, we would receive eternal life. That our hearts would be filled with peace, that we would know the joy that your children have in your presence.
[00:01:11] That we would be able to live in that wonderful, marvelous freedom that you have given us, that our lives might be testaments to your almighty power to change men, to remake them anew as new creatures. And all this to your glory. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
[00:01:37] We're going to read now from Titus, chapter one. We'll read verse nine through sixteen, Titus one, beginning in verse nine. Reading through the end of the chapter, our sermon text is going to be verses 10 through 14.
[00:01:57] I know that's a giant chunk of Titus compared to what we're looking at each week for a while, but we're going to try to make it through five whole verses this evening.
[00:02:09] Hear God's word, Titus 1:9. He must hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught, so that he may be able to give instruction in sound doctrine and also to rebuke those who contradict it.
[00:02:25] For there are many insubordinate empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party.
[00:02:34] They must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to to teach.
[00:02:45] One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own.
[00:02:48] Said Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.
[00:02:57] This testimony is true.
[00:02:59] Therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith, not devoting themselves to Jewish myths and the commands of people who turn away from the truth.
[00:03:13] To the pure, all things are pure, but to the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure.
[00:03:20] But both their minds and their consciences are defiled.
[00:03:24] They profess to know God, but deny him. By their works they are detestable, disobedient, unfit for any any good work.
[00:03:37] Please be seated.
[00:03:52] If you'll go online to do Some shopping.
[00:03:56] Most of you at this point have probably done this. Online shopping has been around at least it's almost three decades now, huh?
[00:04:06] You go online to do some shopping and you can find all sorts of fakes, right? Whether it's artwork. People have been faking artwork for centuries, millennia. Probably people have been faking money, counterfeit coins for just as long.
[00:04:24] But today you can find all sorts of fakes, right?
[00:04:28] Whether it's fake clothing. You go to buy some name brand piece of clothing, you order it, you thought you got a good deal on it, comes in the mail, you open it up and you can tell immediately the quality is not what you thought you were going to get. It was a fake, faked somewhere, perhaps around the other side of the world, made overseas cheaply and then shipped to you at a really good price. And. And you got scammed all sorts of things, right?
[00:04:57] Shoes, electronics, you name it. People will fake it and try to sell it to you.
[00:05:05] Well, it turns out Paul dealt with the same thing.
[00:05:10] Fakers, false teachers, we call them. Usually everywhere Paul went preaching the gospel, right behind him came a group of fakers, people who came claiming to be teachers of the gospel of Christianity, but preaching a false, fake gospel.
[00:05:33] They went around selling, Paul says, for shameful gain. In other words, to make money. Just like people selling fake merchandise on the Internet or making fake money, counterfeiting.
[00:05:45] They went around preaching a counterfeit gospel in order to make money off of God's people.
[00:05:52] Paul here tells Titus that he's to train the new elders and really the whole church in Crete not to pay any attention to these false teachers. In fact, he wants Titus and the new elders to do their very best to stop false teaching.
[00:06:15] Stop false teaching. We'll look at how Titus is supposed to. And we are supposed to stop false teaching this evening by looking first at Paul's warning about the false teachers and then secondly, at his command to silence them, to stop the false teaching. So a warning about the false teachers, the fakeness of it all, and then how to go about stopping this.
[00:06:46] How does Paul warn them? Well, he warns about this fake ministry, these false teachers, by demonstrating, characterizing the false ministry.
[00:06:58] You see that especially in verse 10.
[00:07:01] He says that they're insubordinate, empty talkers, deceivers.
[00:07:06] He says that they go around teaching what they ought not to teach for shameful gain. This is a characterization. He's giving you a word pictures of what these men are like and what they go about doing.
[00:07:23] Now, we've been kind of painstakingly working our way Through Titus chapter one. And as we've done that, hopefully you've seen that Paul has laid out what a faithful gospel ministry is supposed to look like. Like when Paul talked about himself and his own ministry, Titus ministry, what these new elders are to be like and what their ministry is to be like. He's laid out what the faithful ministry is. And now he contrasts that faithful ministry with the false ministry.
[00:07:58] These false teachers are carrying out a kind of teaching ministry, fit faith ministry, you might say an anti gospel ministry. They go about teaching what they ought not to be teaching.
[00:08:14] Paul's describing here just like he's described the faithful ministry. He describes the character of the men.
[00:08:20] He describes their methods and he describes their goals.
[00:08:26] The true ministry, Paul told us, is not self will willed, rather it submits itself humbly to Jesus Christ, serving him faithfully.
[00:08:41] But the false teachers, Paul says, are insubordinate.
[00:08:44] They're very self willed, rebellious, they will not submit, especially will not submit to Jesus and to his teach.
[00:08:56] The true ministry, Paul says, teaches and holds fast to the faithful word and to sound doctrine that salvation from sins comes through Jesus Christ.
[00:09:10] It holds fast to that and it holds that forth to God's people faithfully.
[00:09:16] But the false ministry is characterized by idle talk.
[00:09:22] It focuses, Paul says, on Jewish myths and the commandments of men, not of Jesus the King.
[00:09:34] It's deceitful rather than the faithful word and sound doctrine. It leads men by man made rules, away from the truth and into lies.
[00:09:50] While the true ministry faithfully leads sinners to salvation in Jesus Christ.
[00:09:56] Its aim and goal is saving faith, the faith of the elect, Paul said, and that they would grow in hope of eternal life.
[00:10:07] These men falsely subvert not just the faith of individual Christians, but whole households are led away into destruction.
[00:10:18] The true ministry serves Jesus Christ for his glory.
[00:10:23] The false ministry serves for financial gain, shameful gain.
[00:10:29] It's motivated by greed. These men want your money and so they go around teaching false things.
[00:10:40] Paul doesn't just warn by describing them. And if you read through, it's jarring. If you follow what Paul is doing, he says there are many men like this and Paul should know. If you read the Book of Acts, you read all of his letters. Just about everywhere goes and just about everywhere Paul has to write a letter.
[00:11:04] There are false teachers that have come in right behind him, usually of the circumcision, in other words, of the Judaizers. Jews who had converted to Christianity, claimed to be Christian teachers, but went around teaching Christians to follow the Jewish laws which Jesus had fulfilled and done Away with and teaching Christians to follow the commandments of men, things like the Pharisaical laws.
[00:11:34] Paul's ministry, everywhere he went, was plagued by these false teachers.
[00:11:42] And there are many. And they weren't just in Paul's day. They're in our day. Paul's warning, he left this inspired by the Holy Spirit, not just for Titus and for the church at Crete, but this letter was spread around the whole church. And we all have it now in our Bibles, for our sakes.
[00:12:02] Why?
[00:12:03] If you know your Bible, if you read it, and especially if you read it and you pay attention to this theme of false teaching, you know, it goes way back.
[00:12:13] Israel in the Old Testament was plagued by false teachers, but it wasn't just Israel.
[00:12:20] You go back further, you go back far enough, and you find that this false ministry had its beginning.
[00:12:27] The garden.
[00:12:30] It started at the very beginning.
[00:12:33] The false minister.
[00:12:36] He was an angel of light. And then he rebelled. But he was still a messenger. He came with a false message. And he came with a false message of blathering and deceit.
[00:12:49] Nonsense, really, if you think about what he had to say.
[00:12:53] He came and he said, you can become like God.
[00:12:58] What an empty lie.
[00:13:01] If you eat from that tree, you can become like God.
[00:13:09] And what did he do? He pulled the whole family of the human race down into destruction.
[00:13:21] It's an ancient, false ministry.
[00:13:23] And it's a false ministry that's alive and well today.
[00:13:27] You can go to many churches and you find pastors teaching things that lead men and women away from Christ, not towards him. It's not just in churches, it's on the TV. And since not too many people watch TV anymore, it's on YouTube, anywhere. You can pull it up, not just on a computer. It used to be computer at home. Now you can pull this stuff up anywhere on your phone.
[00:13:54] Everywhere you look, preachers blather on about useless things.
[00:14:01] They tell you that you need to speak in tongues in order to know that you have the Holy Spirit and you're saved.
[00:14:08] Lies and nonsense.
[00:14:11] They claim to have prophecy to explain the events that are going on around you.
[00:14:17] They have this special knowledge that only they have. And you have to listen to them.
[00:14:22] And they tell outright lies.
[00:14:24] They say things that who doesn't want to hear, right? God wants you to be healthy and happy and wealthy and all the while, what do they want?
[00:14:36] They want you to send their money. TV preachers say it. They want you to call in and give them your credit card number. The people on YouTube, they want your following. So they get Your views, you, your monetization. So they get their check from YouTube or maybe they want to sell you their books.
[00:14:53] They want your money.
[00:14:57] But none of the things that they talk about, none of the things that they're peddling to you are the gospel, prophecy, speaking in tongues, and a full bank account.
[00:15:08] None of these will save you.
[00:15:13] They're not the gospel.
[00:15:16] You see the falseness of it.
[00:15:19] Only Jesus Christ can save you.
[00:15:23] You can see maybe this false anti ministry, it's alive and well and it comes straight from the devil. It's not something to listen to a little bit. Maybe he has something nice to say.
[00:15:39] You need to stay away from it.
[00:15:42] You've been warned.
[00:15:45] There's the warning against false teaching.
[00:15:47] But then Paul tells us that it needs to be stopped.
[00:15:52] They must be silenced.
[00:15:54] And then he says to Timothy, Titus, I'm sorry, rebuke them, that they would be sound in the faith.
[00:16:02] He wants this false teaching to stopped.
[00:16:08] And he especially wanted Titus and the elders that he was going to train and appoint to focus on stopping this false ministry, this false teaching. He wanted them to silence it.
[00:16:19] How did he want them to do that?
[00:16:23] Well, if you go back to verse nine, the Elder was someone who had to hold fast to the trustworthy word so that he could do two things.
[00:16:33] He would be able to instruct people in sound doctrine and he would be able to refute or rebuke those who contradict it.
[00:16:41] Paul is taking that teaching about the Elder and his character as well as his duties, and he's applying it to the thing that's right in front of Titus, to this false ministry, this false teaching. You need to instruct in sound doctrine and you need to rebuke those who are contradicting.
[00:17:00] He's going to apply this to the false teaching. How do you silence it? By carrying out those duties faithfully. Well, there's lots of ways in which that needs to happen. The elders of the government of the church, they can silence these false teachers voices by not letting them into the church.
[00:17:20] Don't ordain these men. Don't let them teach in your pulpits. Right.
[00:17:24] If they come in, put them out.
[00:17:30] Further, the elders in Titus and elders today can follow Paul's own example. What is Paul doing in these verses? First he calls the men out. He says there's a range of, there's many of them, but especially those of the circumcision, the Jews, the Judaizing Christians who go around teaching these false teachings.
[00:17:53] So we can call out these false teachings from the pulpit. We did some of that last week.
[00:18:00] Further, what we'll see next time, in verse 15 and 16, Paul takes up the heart of the Judaizers false teaching, the heart of their false doctrine.
[00:18:09] He labels it, he says, this is it, and then he answers it with the truth. Well, part of faithful pastoral ministry is that from time to time, as we hit these issues, as we're preaching through the Bible, we can show you this is a false teaching that's out there. We warn you of it, we tell you what it is by name, and then we answer it with the truth of the gospel.
[00:18:36] But there's more.
[00:18:38] We can follow Paul's example. We can keep them out of the church.
[00:18:46] How do you silence voices that are out there, voices that aren't in the church? The government of the church maybe can say, okay, you can't be a teacher in the church because you hold a false teaching that silences him in here, but it doesn't keep him out of your ear in podcasts or keep you from listening to him on the radio or watching him on the TV or YouTube.
[00:19:11] And really, the same problem was there in Titus's day.
[00:19:15] He couldn't keep these false teachers from setting up shop in the towns on the island of Crete. They could go wherever they wanted, live wherever they wanted, and set up alternate places of teaching to try to lure God's people away.
[00:19:31] How does Titus stop this false teaching? How does he silence it?
[00:19:38] Paul says he's to do so by rebuking them.
[00:19:44] Who is the they?
[00:19:46] We're looking here at verse 13. Therefore rebuke them sharply that they may be sound in the faith.
[00:19:57] He wants Titus and the elders and pastors today. He wants them to rebuke Christians.
[00:20:06] That may be a little jarring, but bear with me.
[00:20:10] Look at verse 12.
[00:20:13] One of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. This testimony is true.
[00:20:26] They, the people that Titus is supposed to rebuke, are the Cretans, in other words, the Cretan Christians.
[00:20:35] And if you need a little bit more to confirm this, that he's talking about Titus rebuking the Cretan Christians, look at the next verse, verse 13 and verse 14.
[00:20:48] He is to rebuke them so that they would be sound in the faith. In other words, so that the Christians would not be led astray by false teaching, but instead would have a healthy faith, a healthy faith in the Lord Jesus through this rebuke.
[00:21:05] And that they would not listen to. They wouldn't devote themselves to the false teachers, those men, those people who turn away from the truth.
[00:21:16] So the people who are Titus is to rebuke, and we are to rebuke in order to silence the false teachers out there.
[00:21:23] Were to rebuke you, the Christians.
[00:21:29] That's one of the chief ways in which the Apostle Paul says. We are to silence the false teaching that's out there. Is by addressing you, God's people, and we are to rebuke you.
[00:21:44] Is that a little jarring? Do I have your attention now?
[00:21:50] Paul here gives us an extremely important principle. One we need to let settle into our minds and begin to think about as we live our lives and as we hear all sorts of voices around us.
[00:22:06] Paul, in verse 12, takes the testimony of a Greek poet, a man from the island of Crete, who.
[00:22:16] Who grew up on Crete, who lived on Crete, who was writing about his own people, the Cretans. It would be like an American person, like someone from Tucson writing about people who lived in Tucson. And he says this. He's a pagan. But Paul says his testimony is true. He says that the Cretan people are liars, evil beasts and lazy gluttons.
[00:22:39] Paul is using this famous quote from the Cretan poet To describe or characterize the sinful tendencies of the Christians in the churches on the island of Crete. In other words, they had been gathered in from the culture. They'd heard the gospel. They'd been brought into the church. Here are all these new baby Christians. And Paul says they still have the sinful tendencies of the culture around them.
[00:23:06] They're liars, evil, evil beasts and lazy gluttons.
[00:23:11] He says they have a tendency to deceive and to be deceived. They have a tendency, like evil beasts, wild animals, to be mean, nasty and cruel to one another.
[00:23:24] And as lazy gluttons, they have a tendency to not want to work hard and to give themselves over to their passions, whatever those might be.
[00:23:36] Paul's point here in connecting the sinful tendencies of the Cretan Christians with the false teaching is to say that our sinfulness, our sinful hearts and our sinful tendencies are what make us susceptible to false teaching.
[00:23:56] I'll say that again. Paul is saying that it is the sinful tendencies of our hearts that make us open to hearing and receiving false teaching.
[00:24:08] I bet you didn't expect that.
[00:24:10] You thought maybe that it was the slickness of the false teachers.
[00:24:15] That they said things that wowed us that sounded wise.
[00:24:21] Paul's saying it's your sinful hearts that make you ready and Willing to listen to those false teachers.
[00:24:31] The false teaching appeals to the evil parts of your heart and you want it. You want what they're selling and what they're saying.
[00:24:41] And so Paul says, rebuke that sin so that they wouldn't be led astray.
[00:24:49] Do you get the principle?
[00:24:51] We can apply it in a variety of ways in our own context.
[00:24:54] As Americans, we have our own sinful tendencies. Now, they line up quite a bit with the Cretan sinful tendencies.
[00:25:02] But as Americans, I don't think it's any understatement or overstatement for me to say that we are obsessed with material prosperity. We love wealth and we love stuff.
[00:25:21] And the health and wealth gospel pitches right down the middle to that greedy heart of the American and dare I say, of the American Christian, it says to our sinful, greedy hearts, God wants you to have lots of money and a happy, healthy life.
[00:25:47] No, no. God wants you to turn from your sin to salvation in Jesus Christ.
[00:25:55] But you hear how the lie appeals to the sinful tendency of the American heart.
[00:26:02] Americans are a mean and nasty people. Ooh, that's not very nice, Pastor.
[00:26:08] Listen to our politicians, go on social media, watch sitcoms.
[00:26:15] A lot of the humor is around people being nasty to each other.
[00:26:22] We're self loving, self centered creatures. We fill our lives with food, with ease, with vacations.
[00:26:30] How many of you hears on a regular basis or maybe says it yourself? I live for the weekend.
[00:26:36] Wednesday's hump day. I'm halfway there, right?
[00:26:39] We live for the ease and the pleasure of the weekends.
[00:26:44] And so with all of this, we don't want a God that comes along and tells us that our sinful desires and our meanness and our nastiness, that we need to leave that behind. No, we want a God that comes along and tells us, I want you to feel good about yourselves.
[00:27:01] In fact, I want you to feel like you're the center of the universe.
[00:27:06] That's what the false teachers in America say.
[00:27:11] They come and they say, God loves you and he wants you to have a good life.
[00:27:16] Utter lies and we believe them and we send them millions of dollars and they fly around in private jets and have umpteen homes.
[00:27:29] We can look at other forms of false teaching that are alive and well in our society and they appeal to the sins of our hearts.
[00:27:36] There's a rise even in churches that teach the Bible, that claim to be evangelical and faithful. There's a rise of teaching that appeals to those who have deviant and sinful sexual desires.
[00:27:51] It comes along and it says, you know, God made you the way you are and it's okay to be a gay Christian.
[00:28:00] I've seen parents that left faithful churches because their child became a homosexual. And they didn't like that. Their church taught against it. So they went and found a church that said that was okay.
[00:28:13] It appealed to the sinful desires of their hearts, and so they followed it.
[00:28:19] Our hearts are very prideful. We like people to tell us good things. We like people to treat us as though we're smart.
[00:28:27] There's a lot of academic, intellectual teaching out there on the Internet. It comes along and it says, you know, your church with its doctrinal teaching, it's been hiding the truth of the Bible.
[00:28:40] But if you really want to get to the truth of the Bible, you need to study under a scholar. And I've got you covered.
[00:28:47] And they come and they teach you that in order to understand the Bible well, you have to learn about. This is just one of many examples. You have to learn about the world, the ancient world of the Old Testament. The only way to really understand the Old Testament is to read and learn from Babylonian and Assyrian and Canaanite texts.
[00:29:08] We had to read a bunch of this in seminary. So I know a little bit about it. But if you go back and you read these texts, then you can learn what people in the ancient world really thought.
[00:29:18] And they say, don't listen to all that doctrine.
[00:29:21] They're going to set aside creeds and we're going to learn the Bible for what it really is. And what they don't tell you is that they're simply repackaging liberal, unbelieving academic scholarship and selling it to you as though it's Bible teaching and they're undermining your faith. And what are they appealing to?
[00:29:39] Your intellectual pride.
[00:29:41] You're smart. You're a smart person. And I'm going to give you what you think you need.
[00:29:47] And I'm going to lead you astray and I'm going to sell you my books and I'm going to make money doing it. And we could go on. There's all forms of sinful, sorry, false teaching. And it's always appealing. It's matching some sinful tendency in your heart.
[00:30:04] Our sin makes us gullible to false teaching. And God says, I will have none of this in my people. I want my sheep cared for. I don't want them to stray.
[00:30:18] And so he wants you rebuked sharply. He wants your sins rebuked sharply.
[00:30:24] He wants pastors to call you to repent of your Sins?
[00:30:30] Why? In this context? So that you wouldn't be led astray, man. I don't like sharp and stern rebukes. I'm sure you don't either.
[00:30:40] But here we find that God says it's good for us.
[00:30:44] Now, why sharply?
[00:30:49] Because what we're talking about here are the tendencies of our hearts, the things that are rooted deeply in you ways we've been thinking and feeling and desiring for a long time, many years.
[00:31:04] And we're stubborn.
[00:31:07] We excuse them. We have all kinds of good reasons for telling ourselves that it's okay and it's not a problem, that I'm prideful or that I'm lustful or whatever it is.
[00:31:18] And when we hear simple, gentle warnings, it's like water off a duck's back, right? Oh, that's not me. We have all of our excuses, right?
[00:31:28] No, we need to be rebuked, and our sin needs to be rebuked sharply. Now, the word here for sharp, you can think of it this way.
[00:31:37] It's like a surgeon's scalpel. The rebuke is. It's not so much the sternness or the sort of the harshness of it, but it's like a surgeon's scalpel. It cuts into the tissue, right? It's cutting skin, it's cutting through tendons and so on in order to get to that rotten cancer or whatever it is, in order to cut it out.
[00:32:01] And in order to do that, it has to be very sharp.
[00:32:04] And the same is true with rebukes of sin, particularly besetting and deeply held sins.
[00:32:11] They got to address directly exactly what the problem is so that you hear it and you can't avoid it.
[00:32:21] So how do we stop false teaching? Well, we start with a rebuke. And you've heard why. A sharp rebuke.
[00:32:30] But he says verse 13, therefore rebuke them sharply so that they may be sound in the faith.
[00:32:42] The rebuke is the beginning.
[00:32:45] But where we're to lead you is away from your sin and towards a sound or healthy think of being of sound mind, sound body. It's that sense of sound, a healthy faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:33:05] If I stop by pointing out your sin and calling you to repent, and that's all I do, I haven't done my job.
[00:33:12] I'm to rebuke the sin, and then I'm to lead you, instruct you, build you up in a sound faith.
[00:33:19] The Christian needs to have a faith that's healthy and whole.
[00:33:26] And how do we do that?
[00:33:28] By teaching you faithfully from the word of God teaching you sound doctrine.
[00:33:36] We'll just think of it in terms of that chief error that we've been talking about, this health and wealth gospel. What does sound doctrine look like there? Okay, you're greedy. We've rebuked the sin.
[00:33:51] Where do we start? We start with God and His glory.
[00:33:58] His glory is the reason you exist here on earth. That's the reason God made everything. That's the reason God made each and every one of you.
[00:34:09] You do not exist for your pleasure. You exist for God's glory.
[00:34:15] God is the center of the universe and you, as well as everything else, exists for Him.
[00:34:23] You are a sinner.
[00:34:25] You're not a good person who needs just a little help to get your life and your career and your marriage back on track.
[00:34:33] You've got a big problem.
[00:34:35] You're a liar, an evil beast, a lazy glutton. You live for yourself and not for God and His glory. And that makes you a rebel of the highest order.
[00:34:47] You've rebelled against the greatest, most wonderful thing there is, the glory of the infinite God.
[00:34:55] And so you need a savior. You need to be delivered from your rebellion and from the affront that you've made to God.
[00:35:03] And God has made a way for you to be saved from the sins of the past, from the sins of your heart, from the sinful tendencies that you continue to struggle with. God has made a way of salvation from that.
[00:35:18] And that is Jesus through His death and resurrection.
[00:35:24] And we need to hold that forth to you.
[00:35:28] God loves sinners just like you.
[00:35:32] And he came to save you from your sins, not to leave you in them, not to encourage you in them.
[00:35:40] But he came to deliver you from them.
[00:35:43] And when Jesus came, we read that he loved his own.
[00:35:50] He loved sinners, and he loved them to the very end. As he hung on the cross, he thought of you.
[00:35:56] You were the joy set before him, that one day he would take you and lead you to the Father where you would live for the glory of God, experiencing all the pleasures and delights in God's presence.
[00:36:09] That was Christ's joy.
[00:36:11] And so he went and died for you on the cross.
[00:36:15] And having saved you, he now calls you to live a life of freedom from sin.
[00:36:20] Not a life of pleasure and self centeredness and delight and greed and hurting others, but a life of hardship. A life of battle, of fighting with sin and sinful desires, of turning from them in repentance and faith to Jesus Christ.
[00:36:39] It's a life of hardship, but a life of freedom, a life of service.
[00:36:45] Now these, this is not blathering.
[00:36:48] It's not vain, empty talking. These are solid, hard truths, truths about Jesus Christ, the rock of refuge and salvation.
[00:36:59] Something that you can stake your life on.
[00:37:05] Because eternal life, your life is at stake.
[00:37:09] Now. When you've been fed and your faith has been nurtured and built up on these solid truths, your heart is no longer full of greed and strife and all that awful stuff.
[00:37:28] Your heart is full of thoughts of Jesus.
[00:37:32] Your faith is made sound and whole and firmly fixed on Jesus.
[00:37:38] And when you encounter that false teaching, here's what happens.
[00:37:45] Your ears are closed to it.
[00:37:48] You hear it and you say, that's emptiness, that's lies, that's nonsense. Someone's trying to deceive me. But I've got the truth.
[00:37:58] I've got the truth, so I don't need what you're selling.
[00:38:04] You see through it for what it is and you turn away from it. Why? Because your soul already has what it needs. Your soul is already satisfied sound through faith in Christ.
[00:38:18] It's healthy because it's fed on Christ.
[00:38:24] That's the aim here.
[00:38:26] That's what stops false teaching. I can't shut them down. I can't turn off their TV stations or turn off their YouTube channels.
[00:38:36] All I can do is hold forth Christ and say, come to Him.
[00:38:42] We live in a world full of fakes, fake watches, sneakers, a false gospel and an anti ministry.
[00:38:53] But the one thing that stops all of that and helps you know the true from the false is if you know the Lord Jesus Christ, if you cling to Him. And not just you cling to him, but more importantly, if you feel him holding you, then when that stuff comes along, you're not listening. Because you're listening to the voice of the good shepherd and you have his hand wrapped around you and he gives you eternal life and the hand of the Father wrapped around his. And no one can snatch you away from him.
[00:39:26] That's how false teaching is stopped. Let's pray.
[00:39:31] Lord Jesus, our Savior, we confess the great weakness.
[00:39:36] We're weak. Yes, because we're humans. We're frail and dust.
[00:39:42] We're fallen. And all the faculties of our mind and heart are affected.
[00:39:49] But we're especially weak because of the sinful desires that well up within us.
[00:39:56] And we confess that in our weakness we indulge those desires.
[00:40:01] And Lord Jesus, we confess that, that weakness, it plays out regularly.
[00:40:08] We hear things and we, in our weakness, give in to them. And so we fall into more sin.
[00:40:15] And sometimes we're tempted to believe the lies that Satan sends our way.
[00:40:22] Oh Lord Jesus, we are weak but you are strong.
[00:40:26] You are the all powerful God. You are our Savior who has the power of resurrection, the power to change hearts the power to send the devil away and he goes away.
[00:40:40] We ask Lord Jesus that you would drive him away from us. Drive away these false teachings from our hearts and fill our hearts with the vision of God, of his glory, of how wonderful that is, of your mercy and kindness. Oh how we need that Lord Jesus.
[00:41:02] We are discouraged, we're weak, we're wounded, we're anemic.
[00:41:08] Fill us with your strength by your holy spirit that we might see you that our faith might be sound and that it would be unwavering. In looking to you and Lord Jesus we confess that it's not our faith that saves us.
[00:41:25] You are our savior so we cast ourselves on you.
[00:41:28] But we do so with confidence that you will save us.
[00:41:33] Hear us we ask. Amen.
