The Disqualified Worker

So it’s going to be a cheerful one today. Good morning Calvary. My name is Josh Laack and I’m one of the elders here. And it’s my honor to be with you today as we dive into God’s Word and understand what it is that he says about dealing with the truth, about being workers for him. And we’re continuing today in our series on passing on the church to the next generation. And specifically, over the last two weeks, we’ve been dealing with this concept of rightly handling the word of truth, of rightly being a worker who can be unashamed before God. And we clearly don’t want people to be teaching and living falsely in the church. And Paul gave an example in my message two weeks ago that these men were teaching that the resurrection had already happened. And we don’t want that first, because it’s not true. And second, we don’t want it because these ideas spread quickly, and when they spread, people become confused and may even be led away from worshipping and knowing the truth about Christ. Now, Josh Spencer spoke in his message last week about how we begin to deal with this when we find people that are teaching falsely. And he spoke on this idea that we are to gently correct those who we find teaching things falsely in the church. And then it says that God may perhaps grant them repentance. We notice that it is not us or our gentle correction that brings people to repentance. It’s God but we are called to be a part of that process. As the body of Christ we are to care about the truth and to care about those who are being misled by false teaching. What a joy it is, brothers and sisters, when this works, what a joy it is to see someone receive gentle correction with humility and to come back and say, yes, I see the truth now. What a joy it is when people are willing to hear God’s truth for their lives, and then come back and put it into practice, that they begin to say and teach and live according to the truth. Unfortunately, while this does work for many, it doesn’t work for everyone. There are some who just don’t seem to care about the truth. There are people who should and do know better, but they refuse to live that way. One of the more blatant examples that I know of right now is a health and wealth gospel preacher by the name of Benny Hinn. And Hinn is known all over the world for his health and wealth gospel, for his faith healings and for his prosperity message. He tells people that the way out of their poverty is to give their money to him. The way to financial blessing is to give up your finances and let him manage them for you. The more you give now, the more blessing you will have later, he promises. And the result of this is that many people have given him their last dime and have spent the rest of their lives destitute and poor. His healing ministry too, has caused way more harm than I have time to go into this morning. Hinn has left a trail of harm not only to individuals, but to the church itself, to the name of Christ itself. His own nephew, Costi Hinn grew up with him, serving in his uncle’s ministry. And in 2012, praise God, Costi received gentle correction and he listened. He came out of his uncle’s church and has grown now to become an evangelical minister, teaching and handling the truth rightly. He wrote a book detailing his uncle’s ministry and the ways in which it causes harm to people. One of the examples in the book just shocked me. Hinn and his ministry were in a foreign country, and they were spending extravagant, extravagant amounts of money on food and clothes and hotels and cars and whatever it was that Hinn wanted. They were spending so much money that Hinn’s own financial advisers called him up and said, you have to stop spending so much money. Hinn didn’t even listen to that gentle correction. He instead immediately began a fundraiser for mission work, where he was at and raised many times more millions of dollars than what he was spending and just put it back into his accounts and continue to spend. Not on the mission, but on himself. And the sad part is it’s not just Hinn. There are teachers all over the world who emulate Hinn’s style, who have their own style. Who do their own thing. Men and women who teach and use the Word of God for their own personal gain, for their own personal reasons, not because they care about the truth. And unfortunately, not all false teachers are so blatantly obvious either. There are many who actually teach and say things that are and sound like the truth, but upon closer examination of their lives and hearts, we find that they are living falsely, that they are causing great harm to some people. I’m not going to take away from the fact that some of these people have brought people to Christ. And the fact that you’ve come to Christ because of them is wonderful, but it doesn’t excuse the behavior in their private lifestyles. I think here of people like Bill Hybels. I think of Carl Lentz and Brian Houston from Hillsong Church, and the one that shocked me and saddened me very recently the most is Ravi Zacharias and the revelations about his lifestyle. And yes, he was teaching and saying things that were true about God, but he was not living and saying truth things to everyone that he was dealing with. He was causing great harm to individuals that he was taking advantage of by using the name of God to give himself excuse to do that. The Bible calls these kinds of people wolves in sheep’s clothing, and they may appear to be sheep or even shepherds at first glance. But upon closer examination, they aren’t interested really in the things of God or in serving him or his people. They’re interested in what they can get out of it, in what they can gain. Sometimes these these men and women can be hard to spot without accountability, but they are damaging to the church. They are damaging to the people that they hurt, and they are damaging to the name of Christ in the world. And if our mission is really to be passing on a healthy church to the next generation, and we’re allowing these kinds of things to be the faces and the examples of what Christianity is to the world, the next generation is going to look at that, and they’re going to ask a very valid question. Why do I want to be a part of that? So for the rest of us in the church, we have to ask our own question what do we do about these false teachers. Especially those who refuse to receive godly wisdom through gentle correction, who are actively causing harm to the body of Christ, to the church? Do we just ignore it? As I mentioned, part of what we’ve been learning from Paul in the last few messages is how to spot and then begin to correct those who might be heading this way. How to help them so they do not continue down this wrong direction. But according to Paul, there is a limit. There’s a line that we have to draw in order to protect the church. And today we’re going to see where Paul draws that line and what we are to do about those who willfully cross it. My point for us today is this one of the jobs of the church is to protect people and to help them grow in Christ. But sometimes protection actually means we must close the door. I understand that in general, churches have not done this well. It’s hard as broken people ourselves to know when and how to draw that line. Sometimes it feels counter to what we think church is to say that someone isn’t welcome. But Paul doesn’t hold back when it comes to protecting the church. And I don’t think we can afford to either.

Today we’re going to continue in 2 Timothy as we discover three characteristics of a disqualified worker and how we should respond to them. We just had 2 Timothy 3:1-9 read to us before the message. And I think you will agree with me when I say that overall, the concept of this passage of Scripture is not pleasant to even think about, let alone begin to deal with. Yet the reality is that there are some pretty harmful people and ideas out there, and it’s our job as the church to deal with them. Paul clearly wants us to steer as many people as we can away from this false way of teaching and living. And unfortunately, he also wants us to understand that not all will be willing to follow this correction, that not all will be willing to be course corrected. So let’s dive a little deeper and let’s see what we can learn about this from Paul’s teaching. So Paul begins, “But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.” And right away here we see a suggestion of the first characteristic of a disqualified worker. A disqualified worker refuses to listen to gentle correction. How do we get there? There’s a connecting word here. The word, but, that tells us that what Paul is about to say is in contrast, but connected to what he just said. And the thing he just said is that with gentle correction, God may grant some to come to repentance. And so the reality of this is Paul is saying what comes next? What we see here and what we see in the rest of the context of this passage, is that not everyone will come to that repentance, and we need to be willing to deal with it. Not everyone will listen to that gentle correction, and we need to address the phrase here the last days. And Paul says, in the last days there will come times of difficulty. Now we can hear a phrase like the last days, and we can think, oh, that doesn’t apply to me. That’s some unknown future church right before Jesus comes back. They’re the ones that are going to have to listen to this message. But Paul is writing this message to Timothy and expecting that Timothy is going to have to deal with it. So the scope, the context of the last days here is everything from when Timothy’s church was there and Timothy was leading it through our church today and all the way up until Christ actually returns. These are the last days. This is the time for us to seek out, to discourage and to repent of false teaching in the church. The phrase should make us not think this is something we don’t need to worry about. It should spur us on to greater concern because we are in the last days right now. And whether we do or not, though, know this church, we will all stand before God. We will all be judged by God, and the only difference is whether or not Christ has covered our sins, whether or not we have repented of our own selfish way of living, our own selfish way of teaching, and instead surrendered to what God has for our lives. So how how do we recognize when someone has crossed this line? Let’s read again as Paul gives us a description of the hearts and minds of people that we are to watch out for. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Having the appearance of godliness but denying its power. Avoid such people. Now we could spend a significant amount of time on each individual trait in this picture, and unfortunately, I was only given this message. So we’re going to take a step back and say, what is it that Paul is trying to convey with this picture, with this description of a disqualified worker. And what we find with a wider view here is a pretty clear spiral of depravity, a spiral of depravity that holds people captive in a prison of their own making. I’m sorry I know this is dark. I know this is hard, but Paul doesn’t hold back here. And we have to be aware of this as the church. We have to know what this looks like in order to protect ourselves and those around us.

Here we see a second characteristic of a disqualified worker. A disqualified worker moves further from God’s truth as time passes not closer. And here Paul is showing us a starting point and adding, bit by bit, showing a progression away from God and away from the truth. This disqualified worker is first a lover of self, focusing their life inward, seeking to love themselves, lift themselves up rather than to love God and neighbor. As they put themselves first it is inevitable that their focus begins to turn to things that they can gain for themselves. They begin to love worldly things, money and things that money can buy. Pride and arrogance over how great they think they are and pride over all that they have grows out of this. They begin to seek to gain more and more without caring how they get it, only that they get it. They’re even willing to harm others to achieve this, and they forego the things that their parents tried to teach them. They’re never satisfied with what they have, and soon they no longer care if their actions are against God or others. They refuse to be stopped. They lie to bring others down to make themselves seem better, and they begin to lose control over what they have begun. Without self-control, it becomes hard not to be this way. They no longer care about right and wrong about stabbing someone else in the back about the danger this kind of life inevitably leads to. They’re puffed up by what they have gained, and all of their desires are on their own pleasures. They don’t care about anything else, including their very maker. And Paul warns Timothy about this here in the context of false teachers and the church, for two reasons. First, because these people can hide themselves, they can have an appearance of godliness, though their hearts and their actions are far from God. Instead, they deny God’s power unto salvation for their lives, and they use even the church to seek more gain for themselves. And second, Paul warns about this in the context of false teachers because people like this try to pull others along with themselves. They try to trick people into being like them. And this is where Paul draws the line. Avoid such people. Avoid them. Don’t let those who actively live out and teach falsehood this way to remain to influence and cause harm to the church. Watch out for those who you have tried to gently correct with the truth of the gospel, and yet they have refused it because they like their earthly pleasures more. They aren’t coming to church to get better. They don’t want to get better. They are here to seek for themselves and to convince others that their way is not only okay, but it’s right. Now in the face of this, I know that I struggle with sin too. In fact, the Bible says we all struggle with sin. But how do people end up not just struggling with sin, but struggling to the point of refusing to acknowledge the truth when it is clearly presented before them? How do they end up so far down in the dark?

And here we have the final characteristic a disqualified worker denies God’s power over their lives, even though they know the truth. Our passage in Second Timothy describes this kind of person and gives us this summary of them, but a larger context for how they end up this way can be found in the other passage that was read for us in Romans 1. In Romans 1 before that passage, Paul tells the church that those who will be known as righteous before God are what? Are those who live by faith. But not everyone will. Some will ignore the truth that they know about God, and they will not honor him with their lives. These foolish people trust in their own hearts, their own understanding unwilling to surrender their desires and their sinful ways to their creator. Worshiping human things instead of our great God. And they surrender to their evil desires instead of surrendering to God’s will for their lives. And this is why they become what we just read about in Second Timothy. And what we find next in Romans from that passage already read for us, is that this description and the command to avoid them, applies to those who see the truth of God in creation, who are warned and know the truth and yet even knowing the truth, they still refuse to surrender to God. The result of this, Paul says, is that God surrenders them to their own will. In this passage, we find a similar list of attributes to what we found in Second Timothy. But here we see that it is God giving them up to these things because they know the truth and they want them anyway. And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. Listen to this, though they know God’s righteous decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. These are not people who are just a little confused or who just don’t know what the truth is. Paul is clear. They know the right thing according to God’s decrees. So what does that look like? Well, if we look back at Benny Hinn’s history, we find that he has come out multiple times to apologize for his ministry. And in 2019, he came out and he gave an apology talk in which he declared that prosperity had gone a little crazy. The understatement of the century. He was going to be correcting his own theology. He said, I think it is an offense to the Lord. It’s an offense to say, give $1,000. I think it’s an offense on the Holy Spirit to place a price on the gospel. I’m done with it. I will never again ask people to give a thousand or whatever amount. I think that hurts the gospel. Hinn said these words out loud on national television. And I wish, I wish we could say Praise God. I wish we could say this man has received gentle correction. I wish we could say he was turning to the truth. Sadly, this apology only happened after his nephew’s book came out and it was just damage control. How do we know? Because he immediately went back to doing it. Immediately went back to preaching and teaching the exact same things. Hinn said in his statement. And many of those like him know, they know that God is not pleased with these behaviors. They know that the outcome declared by God for these things is what is said here in Romans, that those who do them deserve to die. And despite knowing that these false teachers don’t really care. Sure they will apologize if they get called out, but they go right back to it. Hinn has had several public statements similar to this over decades of ministry, and they never last very long. He wants to continue in this lifestyle. He wants to continue in his power and his wealth.

The last thing we see in this Romans passage is that a person who has these characteristics of a disqualified worker doesn’t want to just live this way. They want to approve of others who live this way. They want to bring others along with them. Let’s go back to Second Timothy with this context in mind. And we find that these kinds of people actively seek out others who they can trick or convince to follow them into their depravity. Listen to this. We should avoid these people, Paul says, for among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth. There are a few things that should stand out for us here.

Notice there are actually two types of people that Paul is warning us about. First is clearly the creeps. These are the people that we have been talking about, the people who live these evil, self-focused lives, who refuse gentle correction, and who only seek to appear faithful or godly for their own gain. The warning, though, is not just about these people. Paul is so insistent that these kinds of people are to be watched out for and actively avoided because they encourage and teach others to live this way as well. They seek to capture people to their way. And this leads us directly to the second group that Paul is warning about, and that is those who among us are weak spiritually, those who are tempted easily by the false things that these evil men and women do and teach. They are vulnerable, according to Paul, because they do not have a firm foundation in the knowledge of the truth yet. Without knowing the truth, they are easily swayed by false teaching. I believe the warning here is that we, as the church, are to avoid the disqualified worker in order to protect the one who is still weak. And we do this first by separating them from false teaching, and then by helping them to come to a more full understanding of the truth. We must help in this. We must help in this, because Paul makes it clear that they are unable to arrive at a knowledge of the truth themselves. They are seeking knowledge everywhere, not just where truth is found. But there is still hope for those who are weak in this way. If there wasn’t, Paul wouldn’t give us this warning. He wouldn’t give us the opportunity to deal with it. He would just say, it doesn’t matter, but it does matter. It matters so much because it is possible for us as the church to protect and correct before false teaching or disqualified workers have the opportunity to cause great harm.

Finally, Paul gives a warning directly to the false teachers who have gone down this path. Those who are living lives with the characteristics we have gone through today. Just as Janice and Jambres opposed Moses so these men also oppose the truth, men corrupted in mind and disqualified regarding the faith. But they will not get very far, for their folly will be plain to all, as was that of these two men. The names Janice and Jamboree’s don’t appear anywhere else in Scripture but Jewish writings, and a large consensus of biblical scholars agree that these men were likely the court magicians in Pharaoh’s court when Moses and Aaron came in to perform God’s miracles before Pharaoh. These men stood in the face of the power of God, and instead of bowing down to God’s power, they tried to replicate the things that God did through Moses. You may not know this about me, but when I was young, I was in a magic club. I don’t mean real magic. I mean illusions and tricks. And I really liked card tricks and coin sleight of hand the best. Here’s the thing. If you’re doing a trick like this, you know how it is done. In fact, it’s actually physically impossible to do a magic trick without knowing how it is done. Now, I rarely told people how I was doing these things, but both they and I knew there was a gimmick to what I was doing. They knew it was just for fun. They knew it was something that they could sit and try to figure out and ponder about, but they knew I was not trying to deceive them, but just to have fun. Pharaoh’s court magicians, on the other hand. They were just doing magic tricks and they knew how they were done, but they did them not for fun. They did them to deceive even Pharaoh. That the gods, little g that they worshiped were real, and that they had any ability to stand in the face of the Lord Almighty. I notice reading the story in Exodus that these guys looked pretty good for the first couple of tricks, but it doesn’t take long for it to be evident that man’s tricks cannot keep up with the awesome power of our God. Exodus 8 shows them pretending to copy the staff into into serpents just like God performed through Moses. Then God makes his serpent eat their serpent oops. Then Moses turns water into blood, and then the magicians do it, though I’m not sure how much water was left for them to turn into blood. Then Moses calls frogs and the magicians. They produced some frogs as well. And that’s as far as they get. You will notice if you read the story, that it actually takes God to get rid of the things, including the frogs and the blood, and Janis and Jambres are unable to perform any tricks that look like the rest of God’s miracles. The next thing God does is turn dust into gnats and they try it. But then they say to Pharaoh, this, this is the finger of God. It’s defeat. We can’t do it. Janis and Jambres were corrupted, and they believed that they could get what they wanted from Pharaoh and others with deceptive tricks. The evil men and women who teach falsely and live falsely today believe that they will continue to get what they want, but not so fast. Paul says that they are this way because they are corrupted in their minds, and they will remain this way because they are disqualified regarding the faith, because they have rejected the truth. God has given them up to continue in the hardness of their hearts because that’s what they want. But they will not get away with this, nor get very far at all. Everything done in darkness, brothers and sisters, everything done in secret will be brought into the light. The God of justice will see that everyone receives what they are due, and the folly of living counter to the truth will one day be evident to all. No one escapes from this. No one.

As we shift now to application, it is easy to think about the false teachers that I have mentioned. To think of men and women who have given false prophecies to sell books, or pretended to know God’s will, and twisted the Bible in order to prove that they should be given power and money and sex and anything else that they want. Anything but what the Bible actually offers. And it’s easy to just point the finger and say, down with those people. But it’s not just those people. They’re just the most visible examples of the people that fit this description from Paul. The real list, as Romans one declared, includes all of those who are pretending to be part of the church, yet reject the truth of God laid out before them. They don’t acknowledge God or His authority in their lives, but continue to live out selfish things that cause harm to those around them. In my message two weeks ago, we explored areas that false teaching or mishandling the truth can occur. It wasn’t just pastors. It was all who serve God and who are called at one point or another to speak the truth about God or about His Word. By extension, then any of us can end up fitting this warning if we are not willing to surrender our lives and the words that we use to talk about God, the truth to God. If we’re unwilling to listen to gentle correction of those around us who care for us, if we continue down a self-absorbed path, a spiral of depravity to the point where we deny God’s power in our lives, it can happen to any of us if we don’t take Paul’s words to heart. If we don’t take the truth of God seriously. So what do we do with this? First, for the church as a whole, the goal, the purpose of church is to help people to get better. Is to be a place where broken people can come and grow closer to God, closer to his truth, rather than farther away from it. And it is the job of the whole church to come together and to honor God, and to honor His Word and His truth. But we also need to know that as the church, it’s okay sometimes to draw a line of protection, to say, this is as far as this can go, and no further for the sake of those who are here trying to get better. The church needs to be willing to support those who have to defend this line. Second, on the church leadership level, as elders and pastors, we have to be ready and willing to protect people that God has placed under our care. We implemented the shepherding model here at Calvary because we think it’s important that as a body we are known, led, fed and protected. We think that matters. And so we wanted there to be a way for people to be known for gentle correction, to occur naturally among people who care for one another. We hope that through this life trajectories can be altered, that false teaching, and those who seek only for their own gain and try to corrupt others, can be stopped before they cause more harm to the church and those around them. And we hope that they will be stopped by repentance. But we must be okay with closing the door if they aren’t. Finally on the personal level, for each and every single person, there are only two possible outcomes in this life. Either we have repented and surrendered our whole lives to Christ, or we have not, and the darkness in our lives will be exposed to the light. I don’t know where you are today, but you do. You know where you’re at. And if you’re living your life for yourself today, now is the last days. Now is the time to repent and turn fully to the Creator God. Now is the time to draw your hearts close to him, to surrender your lives to him. That means it’s time to get honest about where you are, and be willing to examine yourself and to say, God, I will go where you lead me. And that might mean joining a small group. It might mean sitting down with a pastor or one of us elders. That might mean finding someone to disciple you. Whatever it is, the alternative is to continue down a spiraling path that is all about you. But if you do, you will not get very far. Let’s worship our God together in truth.