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- Welcome back to our second day of looking at First Timothy chapter four.

We're going to focus on verses three to five today. And as we focus on these
verses, we're going to focus on the false teaching that was being taught in this
church, the church that Timothy pastored in Ephesus. As we talk about that,
we're continuing to talk together about living a motivated life of faith.

If you want to live a motivated life of faith, you have to realize that there is
false teaching out there that Satan wants to use to steal that motivation from
you, to cause you to abandon that life of faith. And depending on who you are,
this false teaching or that false teaching is going to be appealing to you. Some
kind of false teaching will appeal to you and Satan would like to use it.

Now, the defense against false teaching, the way to attack false teaching is
always with the truth. You get to know God's word, you're going to be okay. Get to
know God's word, you're going to know the false teaching that's in these verses
Paul talks about today.

In verse three, he begins to talk about what this false teaching is, what you
and I have to watch out for and help others to watch out for. He says this in
verse three. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain
foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe
and know the truth.

As he walks through these verses, he's talking about a false teaching, a false
humility. And the idea here is that by some kind of self-sacrifice, I can get
myself closer to God. As if Jesus' sacrifice was not enough.

Now I have to make some other self-sacrifice that gets me closer to God. That's
ridiculous. That any sacrifice I could make would even compare to the sacrifice
that Jesus made.

But that's what's in this false teaching. And it appeals to my pride. I gave up
something.

I did something that was hard for me and now I'm closer to God. Look at what I
did. Even if I don't say that to myself, in the back of my mind, there is this
look at what I did attitude.

He's talking specifically here about giving up food. Now, if you want to give up
food for your health or for a diet, there's no problem with that. But it's not
going to get you one inch closer to God.

In fact, if you give up the food trying to get closer to God, if you say I'm not
going to eat this or not going to eat that and it's going to get me into better
relationship with God, if that's your attitude, it's going to have the exact
opposite effect. Because your pride at being able to give that thing up and your
trust that somehow it has caused you to have a deeper relationship with God is
going to affect your spiritual life and you can actually end up further from God in
the end. Now let's get practical about this.

Let's go through the list of what he's talking about here. Paul gives two
examples from these false teachers. He says they forbid you to marry or they
forbid you to eat certain foods as if a food could affect your soul.

He says they forbid these things on the outside so that you can make yourself
feel better about yourself so somehow you feel like you've gotten yourself
closer to God. Now we have a list too. We have the list of, oh, I've given up my
time for God in the church and that's really made me a better Christian than
this person over here because I don't ever see them at Bible study.

I don't ever see them at small group. They've missed a lot lately and you begin
to feel spiritually in a better position than they are. It's the same problem,
the same lie, same false teaching.

It can be about money. You feel like, well, I've given more to this church than
anybody I know. I've given more to this church than probably anybody else on a
percentage basis or I've given more sacrificially to this church than anybody
will ever know.

You didn't do it for God, you did it for yourself. Could be about relationships.
You think about how you've conducted yourself in this relationship or what
you've given up here or how you've sacrificed there and you think, oh, I am so
holy before God as if somehow you've done it and not he's done it in you.

You know where this really gets to us many times I've seen? It's in our
recreations. I see people who think, well, I gave up that little recreation or I
don't do that or I change this recreation and I do it this way, whether it's
about some card playing or it's about where I choose to go and you feel
spiritually superior to everybody else.

I'm not talking about recreations that are obviously evil, recreations like
going to a strip club or something like that, which is obviously treating God's
creation as a thing and not as a person. That's not at all what I'm talking
about. I'm talking about those times when we're spiritually prideful because
we've given up something that somebody else does and we feel like, oh, I'm going to
say it's unholy and I'm going to say that I'm holier than they are because I've
said what they're doing is unholy.

It's all about us. And God has an answer to all this. All this list of rules and
regulations that we have, things that are good, things that are not good in His
creation.

He's got an answer. It's a surprising answer to many people. In verses four and
five, here's what God says about it.

For everything God created is good and nothing is to be rejected if it's
received with thanksgiving because it is consecrated by the word of God and
prayer. Everything God created is good. Now, people read that and they think,
everything is good.

What about drugs? What about things that people use for evil? Everything is
good.

That doesn't mean we use everything for a good purpose. That doesn't mean that
every good thing cannot be twisted by us as human beings and we do and used for
an evil purpose, but God's created it for good. In these verses, there are two
extremely important things about the way that we think.

Number one, material things are not evil. Number two, material things are not
good in and of themselves. Two extremely important things about the way that you
think about material things in these verses.

Number one, material things are not evil. That's mysticism. That's not God's
truth.

God made material things. Heaven, I don't know if you knew this, heaven is going to
be a material place. There's a new heaven and a new earth.

We have an eternal body there. It's a material place, not just this ethereal
cloudy thing. There's this idea sometimes in society that if it's material, it
has to be evil.

That it's equated with that when the truth is God made it. Now we can use it for
evil. Even money is not evil.

It is the love of money, the way that we use money that can be evil. Any
material thing can be used for evil, but you can't blame the material thing. It
is us.

It's in our soul. So the way that I handle that material thing, I choose to eat
this food or not eat that food, that's not going to make my soul not evil because
the source isn't the material thing. That's not where the evil is coming from.

That's what this false teaching is all about. That somehow the evil comes from
my contact with an evil world. That's not where the evil comes from.

It comes from my own soul. It comes from my own selfishness. It comes from my
own heart.

And if you go down this road that material things are evil, you'll separate
yourself more and more from material things, but you won't deal with the source,
who you are. Because again, of our pride, that's what we fall to false teaching.
Material things are not evil.

The second thing to learn from this is material things are not good in and of
themselves. Some people think, well, because God made nature, I don't need to go
to church. I can just go and sit out under a tree, sit by a pond and enjoy God
just as much.

That's just as much worship of God because he made those things. No, the things
that God made are made to be received in relationship with the one who made it.
That's what these verses said.

You receive it with thanksgiving. It's consecrated by the word of God and
prayer. That's a relationship with thanksgiving.

Consecrated, that word means made holy. By the word of God, that's what God says
to me. By prayer, that's what I say to God.

That's relationship. If you look at how God created at the very beginning in the
Garden of Eden, he made a place where we could live, beginning with Adam and
Eve, in relationship with God. A material place where we would live in this
relationship with God.

Creation is meant to be enjoyed in relationship to the creator. And if you miss
that, you miss the joy of what God has made. So material things are not evil.

Material things are not good in and of themselves. They're creations of God. And
I can use them for evil.

I can also enjoy them. I can enjoy what God has made for good by receiving it
with thanksgiving. God, thanks for what you've made.

Thanks for what you've done. And consecrating it by talking to God about it, by
listening to what God has to say in his word about it. It's made holy by my
relationship with him.

Now, as we pray today, I can't help but pray a prayer of thanksgiving. Would you
pray it with me? And Lord, in thanksgiving, we want to say thank you for what
you've made.

Thank you first that you made us. We look at these human bodies and we realize
that they're not perfect yet. They will be in heaven.

But even on this earth, we thank you for the joy of what you've made. The way
that we can interact with this world through taste and through touch and through
smell and through the beauty that we see. Thank you for these bodies that you've
made.

And thank you for the beauty in this world, the beauty of an ocean, the beauty
of a snowfall, the beauty of a sunset, the beauty of a desert, the beauty of a
flower, the beauty of the flight of a bird, the beauty of, oh Lord, we could go
on and on and on and on. And it's all because of who you are. Your creation is
an expression of who you are as our creator.

And so Father, we pray that you help us to enjoy what you have made in
relationship with you. Not expecting that somehow by shutting ourselves off from
creation that we would be more spiritual. And not expecting that somehow that by
connecting with creation, we would be more spiritual.

It's you that we connect with. And your creation is an expression of who you
are. So we thank you, God, for who you are.

In Jesus' name, amen. In our verses tomorrow, we're going to talk about the
importance of exercise for a motivated Christian life.