“Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth.” 1 Timothy 4:1-3 ESV
A thing to remember about our walk with Christ is that we have four primary battles in life – and there’s absolutely no discharge from them. They are:
Our personal battle with sin.
Life’s varied sufferings in a sin-sick world.
Persecution from worldly systems that hate God and, therefore, hate you.
Deception and lies from every corner and even from within the church itself.
Paul’s letter to Timothy is a kind of piggyback to the address he gave to the church in Ephesus while in Miletus (Acts 20:17-38). It’s such a heartfelt – even heartbreaking – address! The assembled elders knelt and prayed with him (verse 36) and they all began to weep aloud and grieve over the things he said. And what did he say? He warned them, just as he does here, of fierce wolves coming after the flock. Think on this. Savage beasts would come, he said (Acts 20:29) and attack the flock. How would they attack?
With lies. With false doctrine.
They weren’t coming to kidnap the elect by force. No. They weren’t coming with duct tape and rope. They were false teachers with seared consciences. So, we’re warned and the link between the false doctrine and damaged conscience isn’t something to miss. In fact, it’s for this reason that Paul has gone to great lengths to explain the qualifications for choosing elders and deacons in the first place.
The connection is this: false theology grows within us when we damage our God-given moral compass (conscience) through habitual sin. The seared conscience is one that’s sold entirely to sin and the false doctrine that’s demon-inspired flows from the heart eager to justify its sin.
The first step is the tolerance of personal sin. Then it’s rationalization rather than repentance. This is a dangerous, dangerous area. The refusal to recognize sin as sin leads to the internal (within our hearts) coverup that justifies the action, usually through extenuating circumstances. For example, a common excuse for adultery and/or porn from men is that their wife wasn’t meeting their needs. The Devil, we remember, is a great humanist. He’ll always agree with us in our self-pity and instead of prayer and faith, he’ll suggest that we self-medicate with some sin or another.
After this, a person must invariably find some form of justification for the sin…which is, the breeding ground of all false doctrine.
The account of Cain’s refusal to repent of his bad attitude in Genesis 4, despite the Lord specifically warning him that he must be on guard against sin lest he be mastered by it, gives us the basis for how we can understand sin and false doctrine. Without our embrace of sin, no false doctrine exists. This is why one’s walk with Christ in faith is so important.
A boxer who never trains or does roadwork will be unfit to fight in the ring. After Buster Douglas defeated Mike Tyson in a monumental upset in February 1990 he took a $25 million payday for his first title defense eight months later in October. But the Buster of autumn wasn’t the Buster of the previous winter. He had gained weight. A lot of it. So, on that October night, he looked like an obese version of himself and was summarily dispatched by the eager challenger, Evander Holyfield, in round three.
The saying in boxing is that a good fighter can win a title but only a great one can hold it.
It’s the same thing here except that our opponent is the Devil himself – and all his minions. We absolutely can’t win on our own power. But…and this is a very big one…we can’t lose when we follow Christ with our all. Those who trust in the Lord for their every day, their every breath, will not be put to shame. They won’t be counted out while laying on the canvas. They escape the pain and regret of a life of sin because they take all of it to Christ to be crucified with Him. That tomb is empty and Christ can’t lose…and if Christ can’t lose, we can’t either.
But to play with sin is like eating donuts when you should be training. Apostasy happens when Christians love self-pity, self-righteousness, and some sin or another, more than God Himself. At some point, if they go far enough, refusing to repent, their conscience is seared. To maintain the lie that their life of sin isn’t, in fact, sin, they’ll justify it by twisting the Scripture. This is exactly and precisely why all false doctrines diminish or flat-out reject the necessity of repentance of sin and the cross. The cross is a stumbling block because it means that no man may keep his sin and come to God. We must come in repentance or not at all. The seared conscience isn’t the one that’s making excuses for sin…it’s the one that calls evil good (Romans 1:32).
Is it any wonder, therefore, why the Democrat party went from saying that abortion should be safe, legal and rare to literally calling it a good thing? Is it any wonder why America so quickly went from a loosening of sexual morals to this current abyss? Is it any wonder that a sinful country doesn’t want the church to speak? At first, it doesn’t want to be reminded of God’s law and its sin. And now…oh, how far we’ve gone downhill with such rapidity! Now, the world will call Christians hateful for calling sin what it is.
This is the logic behind it all. It’s the logic of the hatred of God. It’s the logic of false teachings. All false teachings will offer an alternative to the cross because they want to keep their favorite sin.
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