Danger to the Church, Part 2
2 Timothy 3:2-4
Well let's open our Bibles, this morning, to 2 Timothy chapter 3. In 2 Timothy chapter 3 we come again to verses 1 through 9. We're only this morning going to go through verse 4, but that's better than we did last Sunday when we covered basically verse 1. And we're going to move our way through this list in verses 2 through 4, list of sins that have tremendous tremendous implications in the life of the church.
Now what I told you last week I reiterate to you again. This is a passage that speaks about the danger the church faces. Verse 1 says, "Realize this that in the last days," we saw last week that means the time between the first and second coming of Christ, the time in which we are now living, the church age, "Dangerous or perilous or difficult times will come." That is a prophecy, that fits into the category of a prophecy. That is an inspired prediction and it is true, dangerous times face the church.
The word "times" is the word "seasons" or epochs. And the picture here is the idea that during the period of the church age there will be seasons when the church is under great danger in perilous perilous condition. This is primarily due to the encroachment on the church of false teachers and false doctrine. Verse 13 says, "Evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived." Evil men, impostors who come into the church rising from within become a tremendous danger to the church. False teachers and their product, false doctrine, and their converts, false Christians, are inevitable in the life of the church and exceedingly dangerous. We look at the church today and we know we're in dangerous times. The church as we speak of it in the largest sense, Christianity or Christendom, is mixed up with all kinds of things. It is literally filled with false teachers propagating false doctrine being believed by false converts or false Christians. The church is filled with men and women who deny Scripture in their theology, who deny Scripture in their living. The church tolerates that false teaching, tolerates that ungodly living. Even in some cases justifies it quite as it did in Ephesus where Timothy was when he received this letter from Paul. Only today it's far worse than it was then because evil men and impostors will grow worse and worse and worse as you come closer to the coming of Christ.
We are 2,000 years nearer the coming of our Lord than the church at Ephesus and we then have to suffer the accumulation of deceit and false teaching through all of those centuries that is now encroaching upon the church today. And I told you last week that I think the church is in a tremendous time of decadence, the professing church has within it a growing apostasy and this is of great, great danger to the church. The reason is because of what men have become, verse 2, "For men will be..." he says. The problem is people, people who have become in the church literally the agents of Satan. In 1 Timothy chapter 4 you remember verse 1, the Spirit explicitly says that in the latter times and other similar prophecy, some will fall away from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons by means of the hypocrisy of liars. So there will come hypocritical liars into the church who will deceive people and sell them on the doctrines of demons rather than the doctrines of God. That's exactly what we're experiencing today. Hypocritical liars masquerading as truth teachers, pastors, Christian leaders are coming into the church and they are teaching the lies of Satan. They are coming as the agents of seducing spirits, espousing doctrines of demons. This is within the church.
Now the description of this particular danger here is a description that I believe we have to see as with reference to the church. The danger here is to the church because these are the kind of people who are not only in society but will encroach upon and infiltrate the church. They're very much like cancer in the body. They're cells in rebellion...that's exactly what cancer cells are. In fact, the most traumatizing condition in the human body occurs when cells become disloyal to the whole of the human body, when they in their disloyalty defy inhibition. They multiply without any checks on growth, the spread rapidly throughout the body, they choke out the normal cells. White cells who are supposed to be armed against those invaders won't fight against the body's own cells so the cancerous cells flourish. Sometimes the white cells even rebel and that becomes leukemia. Internal rebellion, the most devastating thing that can happen to the human body, is also the most devastating thing that can happen to the church.
Jesus speaking about the attacks from the outside said, "The gates of hell will not prevail against the church." He was unthreatened among sinners and criminals. But what moved on His heart was not the threat from the outside but the spiritual disloyalty that would come from within. Beware...He said...of false teachers. And here we find the same thing with Paul. Paul knows that persecution refines the church but internal rebellion is a danger to the church. It sucks its power. It debilitates its strength. It weakens it. And, friends, we live in a society today where we do not experience the external persecution that strengthens the church but we are experiencing the internal rebellion that weakens the church. We have cancer in the church, cells are running amuck, out of control, uninhibited. And the body is not even warring against them. It's almost as if the duty that is ours has been shirked and these people have been allowed to run rampant. There is danger to the church.
Now what is the nature of this danger? What are the characteristics of these dangerous people? The first thing, and we'll give you four before our series is through, the first one is listed there in verse 2, "For men will be self‑lovers...self‑ lovers." Now all the rest of the sins that flow out of that in verse 2, 3 and 4 are simply reflections of that pervasive sin. Self‑love is the basic issue here. So first of all, we will say that the impostors and evil men who are a danger to the church are those who love themselves, self‑lovers. And I want to speak to that, if briefly, adding to what I said last Lord's day.
You remember last week that I said to you there is a psychological trend today that wants to blame all people's relational problems on a lack of self‑love, a lack of self‑ esteem, a lack of self‑image. There is this psychiatric theory or psychological theory that says the basic problem that everybody has is they think too little of themselves. They're all like Groucho Marx who one time said, "I would never join any club that would receive me as a member." Now you can understand that kind of mentality. That's what psychologists say man's problem is, we're all depreciating ourselves.
In the 1950's when rather neo‑orthodox theologian by the name of Reinhold Nebor(??) asserted the biblical fact that original sin is self‑love, pride and pretension. Psychologist Karl Rogers reacted against that and said, no, people's problems are because...and I quote from Rogers..."They despise themselves, regard themselves as worthless and unlovable," end quote.
In other words, the theologian said the problem is pride and self‑love. And the psychologist said the problem is a lack of self‑love and a lack of pride. Now which of those two views did the church buy? The core of committed biblical churches have stuck with the true theology, the peripheral ones have bought into the Rogers theory. And 30 years later in society we are infested with the false idea that has penetrated the church and the idea is that I don't love myself enough and I've got to love myself more and esteem myself more and think more highly of myself and lift myself up and push myself and promote myself.
Now you say, "Well why has that become so popular?" Well think about it. It's obvious why it's popular because it denies pride, it denies self‑love, it denies pretension, it denies my sinfulness. It denies the singular mark of my fallenness, my pride. And it eliminates that which most characterizes me as unacceptable to God. Now I am more than willing to say...my problem is I'm too humble. That eliminates all the sin out of it. That makes me a victim. It's very convenient to ignore the reality that my heart is filled with wicked pride and self‑love and happily will I accept the idea that I am a victim of people and circumstances who have pushed me down so low that I don't even have enough self‑love to be spiritual.
What a lying twist on the truth. Sure it's popular. Of course the world will buy that philosophy. They will buy the philosophy of loving oneself because they're already into that. It calls for no change. It accepts their sin, their fallenness, their pride.
It's interesting that even the psychological community is coming to grips with the fact that the idea that man has all of his problems related to his failure to love himself is really a lie. Recently a new book came out under the auspices of the Christian College Coalition, the title of the book is Psychology Through the Eyes of Faith, it's written by David Meyers and Malcolm Jeeves(?). They have a chapter in that book called "A new look at pride." It's very interesting. The intent of the chapter is they collect all of the recent psychological data from the secular world to see if it affirms that man's basic problem is he doesn't love himself enough. And what they discovered was that that's not his problem at all. The data will not support that. They are discovering rather in all the psychological testing which is just a way to get into the heart of man and find out what he's thinking, there is a pervasive pride, there is a dominant self‑love, just the opposite of what they thought. That man is basically self‑serving, self‑loving, self‑justifying and he is so overwhelmed with that bias that it controls almost everything he thinks and everything he does.
For example, and I'll quote generally out of their book, "Time and time again experimenters have found that people readily accept credit when told they have succeeded, yet they attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck or the problems inherent impossibility." In other words, when taking a test, if they are successful they take the credit. If they fail, they blame something else. Typical...typical of you, typical of me, typical of our fallenness. They write, "These self‑serving attributions have been observed not only in the laboratory situations but also with athletes after victory or defeat, students after high or low exam grades, drivers after accidents and married people among whom conflict often derives from deceiving oneself as contributing more and benefiting less than is fair in the relationship?"
Self researcher Anthony Greenwald(?) writes, "People experience life through a self‑centered filter." The problem is not they don't love themselves enough, the problem is they love themselves too much, they're not even realistic about themselves. In virtually any area that is both subjective and socially desirable, most people see themselves as better than average. When tested, most business people see themselves as more ethical than the average business person. Most community residents see themselves as less prejudice than their neighbors. Most people see themselves as more intelligent and healthier than most other people.
When the college board asked high‑school seniors to compare themselves with others their own ages, 60 percent reported themselves better than average in athletic ability, only six percent below average. In leadership ability, 70 percent rated themselves above average, two percent below average. In their ability to get along with others, relationships, zero percent of the 829 thousand students who responded rated themselves below average while 60 percent saw themselves in the top ten percent and 25 percent put themselves in the top one percent.
If Elizabeth Barrett Browning were still writing, she would perhaps rhapsodize, "How do I love ME, let ME count the ways."
At the University of Waterloo, Michael Ross has repeatedly found that people will distort their past in ego‑supportive ways. In one experiment he exposed some people to a message about the desirability about frequent tooth brushing. Shortly afterwards in a supposedly different experiment, these students recalled brushing their teeth more often during the proceeding two weeks than did an equivalent sample of people who hadn't heard the message about tooth brushing.
In other words, the point is we fabricate the past to make ourselves look better. I mean, you know that. When you tell those old tales, men, about your exploits, every time you tell it gets better and better to the point where you don't tell it when your wife is around because she pulls you back to reality...with her editorializing. We...we build ourselves up even in the past, to say nothing of the present. Anthony Greenwald again surmised that human nature is governed by a totalitarian ego that continually revises the past in order to preserve a positive self evaluation. Researches who study human thinking have often observed that people over estimate the accuracy of their beliefs and judgments. As Baruk(?) Fishov(?) and others have demonstrated, we often do not expect something to happen until it does at which point we over estimate our ability to have predicted it. They call it the "I knew it all along" phenomenon.
People also fail to recognize their vulnerability to error because they think so highly of themselves. They don't want to think they can make a mistake. Margaret Matlin(?) and David Stang(?) again in psychological research, have amassed evidence pointing to a powerful Pollyanna principle, that people more readily perceive, remember and communicate pleasant than unpleasant information. Positive thinking predominates over negative thinking.
At Rudgers University, Neal Winestein(?) also has discerned a consistent tendency toward unrealistic optimism about future life events. Most students perceive themselves as far more likely than their classmates to experience positive events, such as getting a good job, drawing a good salary and owning a house. And is far less likely to experience negative events such as getting divorced, having cancer, and being fired. Under certain conditions, most people have been observed to act in rather inconsiderate, compliant or even cruel ways. When other people are told about these conditions and asked to predict how they would act, nearly all will insist that their own behavior would be virtuous.
Now the sum of all this, according to Meyers and Jeeves, "The most common error in people's self‑images is not unrealistically low self‑esteem, but rather self‑serving pride...not an inferiority complex but a superiority complex," end quote.
The problem with people is they think too highly of themselves. They love themselves too much. That's a sin. And it's out of the sewer pipe of self‑love that all the filth flows that is listed in verses 2, 3 and 4. Even self‑depreciation, even putting oneself down is a mechanism to get someone to compliment you...to build you up. You see, the heart of man is deceitful and the heart of man is deceitful enough to deny its own ugly, self‑loving, self‑serving pride when given the opportunity.
You say, "But, John, what about in the Bible it says we're to love ourselves?" It never says that in the Bible. There's no command in Scripture to love yourself. You say, "What about love your neighbor as yourself." That tells us to love our neighbor, not our self. Well what about husbands, love your wives even as your own bodies? That says love your wife. You say, "But it says as yourself." Yes, it doesn't command us to love ourselves, it assumes we do. Did you get the difference? It makes that assumption. Why? Because that is reflective of our fallenness. That's an assumption, not a command. And I daresay, if we weren't fallen, the Lord wouldn't have to make the command or the parallel. So self‑love is a sin. The Bible constantly warns on the other hand against pride and self‑love and calls self‑love a sin. The Bible doesn't teach us to love ourselves, it assumes that that is a part of our fallenness and we need to give to others what we so readily give to ourselves by way of attention and concern. The pervasive deadly sin that grips the human soul is pride and self‑love, and out of that sewer pipe flows all the rest of the things that he gives us here.
Samuel Johnson preaching in the eighteenth century said, "He that over values himself will under value others. And he that under values others will oppose them." That's right. The problem with relationships isn't that I don't love myself enough, the thing that destroys all relationships is I love myself too much. And if I'm more valuable than you, then I'm going to have to fight against you to get what I want and therefore I'm in opposition to you and we can't have a relationship on that basis.
Now what flows from this? Let's look back at verse 2 and we're going to consider this list this morning. "For men will be lovers of self...one word, philautos, and then a second word, philarguros...silver lovers, money lovers." Love of self, my dear friends, leads to covetousness. You love yourself, you want to indulge yourself. You love yourself, you want to feed your desires. You are a silver lover. That's materialism...self‑ consumption. It's the same word used in 1 Timothy 6:10, "For love of silver is the root of all kinds of evil, or the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil." There it appears in a noun form.
Now what you have then, what you have then is this mentality that says "I am consumed with my own self love," and therefore the next thing is, "I must indulge myself." And that means I'm going to love money, I'm going to covet.
This could readily be seen as a problem in the Ephesian church since Ephesus was a prosperous city, it was a city of wealth, it was a city of materialistic blessings. It was even called "the treasure house of the ancient world" by some writers. It was called "The Vanity Fair" of Asia Minor. And because of the rampant materialism in Ephesus it had encroached upon the church and the church was in grave danger from it. That's why Paul wrote about it in the first epistle to Timothy, chapter 6. And here again in the second epistle to Timothy, chapter 3. And may I hasten to say, false teachers are always money lovers? First Timothy 6:4 characterizes them as such. Titus 1:11 characterizes them as such. Second Peter 2:2 and 3 characterizes them as such. Why? Because they are consumed with the love of self.
Misdirected self‑love then indulges itself on self‑ gratification. And we are in a dangerous time in America in the church of Jesus Christ because the church is in to self‑love and if it's in to self‑love it's in to self‑indulgence. And what you've got encroaching on the church today is a bevy of psychologists saying we have to love ourselves more and esteem ourselves more. And coming right on their heels, a lot of prosperity preachers who are saying, "Jesus wants you healthy, Jesus wants you wealthy, Jesus wants you rich," because the two are inseparable. And one will give birth to the other and one will feed on the other. And you look at the church today and you see the encroachment of a self‑love psychology and the encroachment of a prosperity gospel and they're in the same partnership right here in this verse, only in the church today they're being sold as if they were the things that are desirable, here they are called sin and danger to the church. Big difference. That's how deceived the church is and that's why we're in danger.
And then he moves on and gives another pair of sins that go together. The first one is boastful, this is the outward pride that springs from self‑love. If you love yourself, you're going to boast about yourself, you're going to shoot off your mouth about yourself. You're going to talk about yourself. The word alazon means a bragger, a bragger. A bragger is someone, Plato said, who claims to greatness which he does not possess. He speaks about himself in terms that are not related to truth or reality. He brags and boasts about his accomplishments, overstating the truth to the degree that it has no truth for the simple purpose of impressing other people with his greatness. These are the people who parade around as if they were the heroes, the know‑it‑alls who deceive people into thinking they are wise. They love to see their name in print. They love to see their face on television. They're pretenders whose pretensions are most important to them...the most important thing on their agenda is to promote themselves. They lack self‑effacing humility. They are boasters. They are proud.
Again, characteristic of false teachers, as 1 Timothy 1:7 and 6:4 reiterates. You listen to them preach and they will always be the heroes of their own stories. Every story they tell will be about them. They will exaggerate their own ability, they will exaggerate their own achievements, they will exaggerate their own accomplishments, they will exaggerate their own value. They will feel indispensable to everything going on in the world and try to make you believe that they are the claim to greatness that they do not possess. But if you're building your whole approach to life on self‑love, you will covet and you will boast.
The companion to that boastful sin is the sin of being arrogant. That is to be proud in heart. This is to the inside what boastfulness is to the outside. This is a heart that is involved in self‑exaltation. The idea being that everything I do I am motivated to do by the desire for self‑exaltation. I want to exalt myself. That's what moves me. That's what shapes my decisions. That's what making me act, the evil motive of self‑ exaltation.
The result of this is contempt for everybody else. In the pursuit of self‑exaltation, anyone who gets in my is worthy only of my contempt. William Barclay gives us a good picture of the distinction between these two terms. He says, "The braggart is a swaggering creature who shouts his claims to the four winds of heaven and tries to boast and bluster his way into power and eminence. No one can possibly mistake him or fail to see him. But the sin of the man who is arrogant in this sense is in his heart. He might even seem to be humble, he might even seem to be quiet and inoffensive, but in his secret heart there is this contempt for everyone else. He nourishes an all‑consuming, all‑ pervading pride. In his heart there is a little altar where he bows down before himself and in his eyes there is something which looks at all men with a silent contempt. The best illustration is the Pharisee who said, `I thank Thee that I am not as other men, even as this Publican,' whom he distained and treated with contempt in his self‑exaltation."
You look at the church and look at the bragging boasting people you see, the parading people across the media who believe that everything revolves around their little world and who are the hero of all their own stories. And look more deeply into the heart of those who are contemptuous toward others because the only thing on their list of motivation is how can this accrued to my benefit. We're moving fast, I think, to almost a pre‑ reformation, proud and dead Christendom. When Christianity will be a parade of the noble and the elite and the proud and the arrogant and the worldly and the materialistic and the indulgence will reign supreme rather than the truth of God. And maybe they'll have to be another Reformation.
You ask yourself, "Where are the humble? And where are the meek? And where are the lowly who speak only of Christ and never of themselves?" And you look a long time before you find them.
And then he moves to another sin in verse 2, "Revilers," blasphemeo, we get the word blaspheme from it. Those who are abusive in speech. It means to slander someone, to be abusive in speech, to hurl abuse at people, to injure others with your tongue. Blasphemers, revilers, abusive...see this is what happens to self‑lovers. You love yourself, you love the money that feeds your self desire. You love yourself, you boast on the outside and you're arrogant on the inside. You love yourself and you treat everybody else with contempt and that ultimately ends up in verbal abuse. Pride begets contempt and contempt begets a wicked tongue. These self‑lovers will attack and they will hurt and they will injure and they will devastate with contempt. They have no care for others. Their agenda is to love themselves. Their tongues will lash out with venom toward other people.
And sad to say, beloved, that is true in the church of Jesus Christ today, that there are those people who feel that in their own self‑promotion they gain their position by destroying