A Daily Walk

Announcer: In light of all that is taking place around us in our nation and world, we've decided to turn to a passage of scripture that fits our situation like a glove, so to speak. 2 Timothy 3 describes what the last days will look like, and it's quite evident that we're living in them. Why will they be so difficult and how are we to face them? We're about to find out here on A Daily Walk from 2 Timothy chapter 3 verse 2. Here is Pastor John Randall talking about living in the last days.

John Randall: In verse 2, it says the unholy person becomes unholy. They're driven by self-love to gratify their own lusts and passions, whatever sort they are, as fully as possible. Listen, the unholy person lacks any kind of modesty, any kind of decency, or doesn't care about personal reputation at all. Just do whatever they want to satisfy themselves. I don't care what people think. I don't care how indecent people think it is, just unholy.

Not set apart, just everything that is profane. There's nothing sacred, just unholy living, which gives way to verse 3, unloving. The word unloving here literally means without family affection. In the last days, the perilous times that will come is men will be so focused on self-love that even the closest ties that they have will mean nothing to them. They'll disassociate from even a family connection and love. Just, I don't care.

Which will also give way in verse 3 to unforgiving. Unforgiving is a word meaning not only a person who is difficult to be reconciled with, but those who are absolutely irreconcilable. They will not forgive. They are so bitter that their heart has become calcified, solidified, hardened to the point that it doesn't matter what you say, what you do, they are unforgiving in the last days.

And they will be slanderers. The word slanderer here comes from two words meaning to throw between. The intent and the effect of the slanderer is to falsely accuse and divide people without any reason. There's some people, they've got nothing better to do but just slander other people and divide people in the process. That's all they do.

Because of what? Self-love. The Bible tells us in Proverbs 16:28, "A perverse man sows strife and a whisperer separates the best of friends." Slanderers, verse 3, they will be without, in the last days, self-control, brutal, despisers of what is good.

If you don't have the Spirit of God working in your life, if you've quenched the work of the Spirit in your life, then you are without the fruit of the Spirit in your life, which is self-control. To be without self-control means you don't have any ability in yourself to curb your own passions or control your own lusts. You're just given over to them.

Bible talks about that in Romans 1 that God gives people over to the pursuits that they're going after. They've rejected Him. God gives them over to those things. He's not going to force a relationship. If you want to pursue that, you can pursue it and God will give you over to it. And Satan will open the door gladly for you to pursue it. There's just no self-control at all in so many areas of life, whatever that might be.

And this lack of self-control leads a person to become brutal. It means fierce and untamed. It's as if that person without self-control gets to the point where they live on an animal plane, living just simply to satisfy biological needs. That's it. There's nothing above that. Just living on that animalistic kind of plane, just to satisfy self, gratify self. And when that's done, do that again over and over, repeatedly.

They become without self-control, brutal, and that brutality leads to, listen carefully, they become despisers of what is good. And the word good here speaks of that which is spiritually beneficial to another. They hate the name Jesus. They hate the church. They hate the word of God.

They despise it. In their love for self, they've become haters of what is good and they hate what should be loved and they love what should be hated. The Bible puts it in this way, in the book of Isaiah chapter 5, it says, "Woe to those who call evil good and they call good evil. They substitute darkness for light and they substitute bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."

That's part of a sign of the last days. People will look at what should be classified as evil and they will say that is good, and they will embrace it. And they will look at that which is good and say that's evil. That's not tolerant. And they'll despise it, they'll hate it. They exalt that which is an abomination in the sight of God and they disdain that which glorifies and honors God.

Jesus said this in John chapter 3 verses 19 and 20. He said, "This is the condemnation that has come into the world, that men loved darkness rather than light and they will not come to the light lest their deeds should be exposed." Men begin to love darkness. They begin to gravitate toward darkness, to hide in darkness, to find shelter in the shadows of a sinful life.

And yet, light and darkness are both the same to the Lord. Nothing is hidden from His sight. He sees it all. But they become brutal and this brutality and this despising what is good, verse 4, leads to being traitors, headstrong, and haughty.

The word headstrong is just another word for reckless. When you love self above everything else in your life and when self-love takes over and you hate what is good because it's an affront to self-love, you can become reckless. You don't care who you run over, you don't care who you hurt, you don't care who you offend.

You're just reckless and it means there's just no thought of what consequences will follow your actions. You don't care. And some of us, if we were to look back at our life before Christ, that was us, reckless. We didn't care. Break that person's heart, hurt that person, I don't really care. It doesn't really matter to me because I'm living to satisfy self.

And you become reckless and then you become not only reckless but you become haughty in your reckless. You're proud of the fact, you're boasting of how reckless you are. "You want to know how reckless I am? You should have seen me last weekend! Woohoo!" And that's the kind of mentality that you have. Like, you've lost your mind. No, no, you've got a mind that's full of self-love, self-gratification. You are bound. You are doing the will of the devil. You are a captive at this moment, you just don't realize it.

They become traitors, headstrong, haughty, and verse 4 says, "lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God." Love of self can lead to the love of money, can lead to all of these other characteristics and then comes to a place of loving pleasure instead of loving God. The love of pleasure here that Paul speaks of is talking about sensual pleasures, sensuality, loving that, loving meeting your own needs, as it were, rather than living for the glory of God.

That's where it becomes reduced to, loving pleasure more than loving God. And this is something, you know, God gives us richly all things to enjoy in the confines of His will. The Lord loves to bless. God sets up boundaries, not to be restrictive from things that are good, but to be protective from things that are destructive.

And some people want to fight against that and see the boundaries that God has set as God being restrictive or He hates to bless you or He wants to keep you from something that could actually be good, when in reality God's keeping you from something that could harm you, could destroy you. I mean, I know countless people throughout my life who have lived for the love of pleasure and they've had every experience you could ever desire and they are as empty and as miserable and unfulfilled, unsatisfied, as anybody you've ever met.

Because it's not enough. You can't involve yourself in enough pleasure. You can't involve yourself in enough things to ever have a satisfaction that you actually can be content. It just doesn't work that way. It just drives you on to want more. You're still searching, you're still looking.

And that may be you this morning. Maybe you've come in here today and you've just been on the search, you've been on a quest to find something and you looked in this relationship with this person or this experience that you've had or this vacation that you took, and all of these things just, they leave you flat, they leave you empty, unfulfilled.

These are the things that will characterize what the last days will be like and I believe that we could see these very things taking place right now. Jesus says, "As it was in the days of Noah, so shall the coming of the Son of Man be. As it was in the days of Lot in Sodom and Gomorrah, that's what it's going to be like." And we're there. We're there.

But when you come to verse 5, it adds a completely different level to this passage, which I believe makes it even more alarming. Because you can read the first four verses and you might say, "Well, I'm not, you know, those people in the world, haters. Those people in the world, arrogant, boasters." You could think, "I know people like that. Oh yeah, first four verses, know them."

But look at what he says in verse 5, talking about the same group of people: "Having a form of godliness but denying its power, and from such people turn away." Keep in mind the context here. These same people that are lovers of self, lovers of money, and all the rest of the characteristics that Paul laid out for Timothy, these same people have a, listen, a form of godliness, but they deny its power.

Another translation reads, "they will maintain a facade of religion." They will appear to have a godly life. They will keep up make-believe of piety, yet exclude its power. They keep up a form of religion, they will have nothing to do with it as a force. Having a form means they have a spiritual practice that is nothing more than a masquerade.

Actually, the Greek word for form here is the word morphis, and it refers to the mere outward resemblance as distinguished from any essential reality. It is an appearance of something, but it's not a reality.

When we travel to Israel, there is one place that we visit, they are called the ruins of Beit She'an. Actually, it was in nearly this place where King Saul was hung after he had been killed in battle on the mountains of Gilboa. But nonetheless, in this place, there are the remnants of Roman ruins.

And in one particular area, and down this main street, this colonnade, you would walk down and there is a series of steps that lead up to a platform and it only goes back about maybe two or three feet deep. So you walk up to this platform and you get there and it's only two or three feet deep, that's it. There's a hole in the ground down at the bottom.

And what it was at one time was one of the Roman temples honoring one of their pagan gods. And the facade or the front of it, you would look at it and it would be this incredible edifice, I mean just the beautiful architecture. You would think, "That is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen."

And you would walk up the colonnade steps and you would walk through the door and there's only three feet here. Like, it ends. This is the temple dedicated to a false god. They wanted it to appear to be something so powerful, so monumental, but when you walked in there was no depth at all. There was an altar only to a false god.

And some people in their Christianity, that's what their life is like. It's just a facade. It's a masquerade. It's what Jesus said when he talked to the Pharisees and he said this in Matthew 23: "You cleanse the outside of the cup and the dish, but inside it's full of extortion and self-indulgence," Jesus said.

It's what Isaiah described in Isaiah when he talked about rebellious Israel in Isaiah 29:13 and he said, "They draw near to me with their words and honor me with their lips, but they remove their hearts far from me." It appears to be something but in reality that's not the case. They have a form, an outward adherence or resemblance of Christianity, but at the same time they live like they don't know the Lord.

So Paul says there's this form of godliness that they have, but they deny the power. To deny means that they refuse to have a godly life. They refuse to put it into practice. They hear it, they refuse to do it. They have the appearance that it's godly, everything's together. They've got the best looking Bible you could ever imagine. That is an awesome Bible. And that Bible cover? Legit.

I mean, it's just, they've got the sticker, they've got the everything, they've got all of this, they have it, they show up, they go through the motions, feed the homeless, whatever it is that they do, but they choose to live a godly life at the same time.

And the apostle Paul, he gives a strong word here which implies they know yet they decisively reject the truth. And he puts it in what is called the Greek perfect tense, which indicates they are in a permanent state of denial. They just deny it. They assume because I have the facade that everything's good, but they're denying the fact that they're not living the truth.

They're not living according to God's word. At some point in the past, they've denied the power of a godly life and they continue to do so by the way they live. The ungodly thinking and teaching manifests itself in ungodly living. Paul said it this way in his other pastoral epistle when he wrote to Titus, Titus chapter 1 verse 16. He said, listen carefully, "They profess to know God, but in works they deny him, being abominable, disqualified from every good work."

Did you hear that? They profess to know God, but in works, in life, they deny it, being disobedient and being disqualified from every good work. What God would want to do, what God desires to do is disqualified by the fact that they've quenched the work of the Holy Spirit. They're not responding to it. They adhere to it with their ear, but they deny it with their life.

And the word that Paul uses when he says they deny the power, make note of this, it's the word dunamis. It's the same word that's used to describe, listen, the power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus said to his disciples, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you." Same word: dunamis, dynamite power. That's where we get our English word dynamite.

The power of the Holy Spirit. So if you quench the work of the Holy Spirit, then it cuts you off from the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit's grieved. You're listening to it, but you're living like you don't believe it, and it quenches the work of the Spirit, it grieves the Holy Spirit.

And so there's this lack of power in your life and you just keep living an ungodly life repeatedly and you're wondering, "Why can't I ever go forward? How come I can't get beyond this?" Because you have a form of godliness, but you're choosing to deny the power that's accessible to you by living an ungodly life.

And I believe personally that this is a message that the church needs to hear today. Paul's talking about people that were coming into the church like this, having this form of godliness and denying the power.

Paul then says to Timothy, how is Timothy to respond to this? How do you deal with that? And these were some who were false teachers who were coming in with this false understanding you could live this way and you could hear what they're saying but you could live opposite of what really the Bible says. How are you supposed to deal with that? He says to Timothy, "Avoid them."

Avoid them. What does that mean? It means to turn away from, to distance oneself from. It means these men were to be avoided. Timothy is commanded to turn himself from these men. It doesn't mean that Timothy stops loving them, doesn't mean that he stops praying for them or that he's hopeful that they'll repent and turn.

But Paul's saying, "Listen Timothy, you got to avoid these guys." Why? He tells us why in the very next verse. He says in verse 6, "This is the danger: For of this sort," these that I'm talking about, "they creep into households and they make captive of gullible women loaded down with sins, led away by various lusts, who are always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

Why is he supposed to avoid them? Because these guys were coming in with this form of godliness that denied the power. They were lovers of self and all of these characteristics followed them and they preyed upon those who were weak in the body, who were struggling in their own sins and just said, "Hey, you're fine, come along. Listen, you can still be godly and do this. Hey listen, I really like you, I'd like to hang out, why don't we go and let's," you know, and they would prey upon gullible women who are loaded down with sins, who they also were hearing the knowledge of the word of God, but they were never able to come to it as Paul says here.

They were always learning, but they couldn't come to the knowledge of the truth. And why couldn't they come to the knowledge of the truth? Because these very men were taking them and leading them astray. Paul says, "Avoid those that would do that." Those that would take advantage of those in the body of Christ who would live an ungodly life and then lead others to live an ungodly life, avoid them, mark them, Timothy, be mindful of that.

Because they're lovers of self and they're using this love of self and this form of godliness as a cloak for all kinds of immorality and lustful practices, Paul said. Be aware of it, Timothy, avoid it. They creep into households and they take captive those who don't know any better and they deny the power of the Lord.

And here you have people who are feel that they're godly based upon half-truths, which are lies. And Paul says in verse 8, "Let me tell you what these guys are like." He says, "They're like Jannes and Jambres who resisted Moses, and so do these also resist the truth. They are men of corrupt minds, disapproved concerning the faith, but they shall progress no further, and their folly will be manifest to all, as theirs also was."

Remember Jannes and Jambres? They were the magicians that resisted Moses. And Paul reminds Timothy of this Old Testament example of the resisters of truth. These were the magicians in Pharaoh's court. You remember when Moses came and stood before Pharaoh there in Exodus chapter 7? Moses threw his staff down, the magicians they threw their staffs down, they did the exact same thing, they both turned into snakes.

And Moses' rod swallowed up their rod. Maybe you saw the movie. It happened. Remember they did that?