From His Heart

Dr. Jeff Schreve: Now the false teachers, the Bible makes it clear they were rebels and they were rabble-rousers. They were upsetting people in the faith. Now when Paul wrote to Titus, Titus was on the island of Crete. And what he told him to do is he said, "I want you to set the house in order," talking about those who are false teachers, rebels, and rabble-rousers. So what does God want us to learn? What does He have to say about dealing with people who want to corrupt the purity of sound teaching?

Larry Nobles: Welcome to the Midweek Edition of From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Schreve, who today will uncover the plans of those in many churches who are rebels and rabble-rousers. God demands that false teaching is not to be tolerated. So the question is for Christians in the church: how can we be on guard against anything coming in that's less than truthful, biblically truthful?

In today's candid message from Pastor Jeff, he explores God's standard for dealing with the silencing of those in the church who are deceptive in their teaching of the scriptures. This lesson is one of eight that we've been airing this month from the practical series called Setting the House in Order: A Study of the Book of Titus. If you missed any of these lessons, you can go online to listen again at FromHisHeart.org; just click the listen link. Open your Bible now to chapter one. Here's Pastor Jeff with part one of the lesson that the church needs to hear. It's about the rebels and rabble-rousers.

Dr. Jeff Schreve: I think it was around the Civil War time that we figured out as a society that there's something called disease that gets in if you don't scrub up, if you don't clean yourself. You can't allow bacteria to come in when you're doing surgery, when you're opening somebody up, because if that happens, the surgery is going to be worse. The cure is worse than the sickness that the person had, because they're going to die for sure because then that stuff gets inside of them. So you have to clean up. You can't have any germs in the operating room.

In Christianity, it's very, very similar. God has His word and His word is pure. You can't mix in error with the word because when you do that, it's like adding raw sewage to pure water; you're going to contaminate the whole thing. Now the devil is the one in the scripture who sows bad seed in the Lord's field. He's the one that Paul said in the book of Acts, he never ceases to make crooked the straight paths of the Lord. So he's all the time looking for opportunities to inject error and to add disease, so to speak, into the operating room so that people will die. And they're not going to die physically; they die spiritually and they're separated from God forever and ever and ever.

Now when Paul wrote to Titus, Titus was on the island of Crete, one of the islands of Greece. And he's on this island, and Paul had been with him to establish churches there, but then Paul wasn't able to stay and so he left Titus there in Crete. And what he told him to do is he said, "I want you to set the house in order." He says that in verse five. That was Titus's function. He said, "For this reason, I left you in Crete that you might set in order what remains and appoint elders in every city as I directed you."

And then he went on to say, "Here are the qualities of the man of God that I want you to set over the churches there in Crete," and he gives the qualifications of a pastor. And one of the things as he closes out the qualifications of a pastor in verse nine that he says is that the man of God must hold fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, that he may be able to do two things. The job of a pastor is to do two things: to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict.

And then he spends verses 10 through 16 talking about those who contradict, talking about those who are false teachers, talking about those who don't want to scrub up, who want to go into the operating room with their sickness and with their disease and teach what they want to teach, who want to make crooked because they're energized by the devil, who want to make crooked the straight paths of the Lord. So we're going to deal with that subject in a message I've entitled Rebels and Rabble-Rousers.

I remember the first time I ever heard the term rabble-rouser. I didn't know what it was. I was in college and I thought, "What's a rabble-rouser?" And my discipleship leader told me, he said, "A rabble-rouser is somebody that stirs up the people, somebody that has an agenda and he gets everybody excited and stirred up and upset so that he can get done what he wants to get done." Now the false teachers, the Bible makes it clear they were rebels and they were rabble-rousers. They were upsetting people and upsetting people in the faith.

Look at what Paul says in verse 10: "For there are many rebellious men." This is why you have to refute those who contradict. "For there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision." He had a lot of problems with people who were Jews who claimed to be now converted Jews and Christians. Those folks were giving him problems. The whole book of Galatians is about the problems that he had with the Judaizers.

It says verse 11: "who must be silenced because they are upsetting whole families, teaching things they should not teach for the sake of sordid gain. One of themselves, a prophet of their own, said, 'Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.' This testimony is true. For this cause, reprove them severely that they may be sound in the faith, not paying attention to Jewish myths and commandments of men who turn away from the truth. To the pure, all things are pure; but to those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure, but both their mind and their conscience are defiled. They profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him, being detestable and disobedient and worthless for any good deed."

So what does God want us to learn? What does He have to say about dealing with false teachers, about dealing with people who want to corrupt the truth and the purity of sound teaching? Two lessons. Lesson number one: false teachers can be identified. There are false teachers. Peter said false prophets arose among the people just as there will also be false teachers among you. And Jude, the last book of the Bible before the book of the Revelation, says that the false teachers have come. Peter says they're coming, and Jude says they're here, and Paul was dealing with them on the island of Crete.

The devil's always working, and he works through people to make crooked the straight paths of the Lord. So the very first thing is you can identify a false teacher and I can identify them. Paul knew who they were, and Titus knew who they were, and he gives a description of what a false teacher looks like to help you and me because not everybody who's talking about heaven is going there. Not every church who has a preacher and they gather on Sunday morning, not every church has a preacher who really believes the truth, who really preaches the truth.

Not everybody you listen to on television or on the radio or you read something on the internet that this guy or this woman wrote, it's not all true. So it's important to be discerning and to be able to recognize truth from error and false teachers from true teachers. So let me give you some characteristics of a false teacher. Number one: they are unwilling to submit to authority. "For there are many," verse 10, "rebellious men." Rebellious men are unwilling to yield to authority.

That word "rebellious" can also be translated insubordinate, unruly. They're not listening to anybody. They wouldn't listen to Paul, they wouldn't want to listen to Titus, they wouldn't want to listen to the pastor of the church, anyone that they would put over them. They're rebellious because they're like, "Nah, I'm going to do my own thing. I'm not listening to you." That's one of the first big marks: he's a rebel.

Now, similar to the devil, anytime you get somebody that's doing the work of the devil, they're going to have the fingerprints of the devil on their lives, and the devil's a rebel. He was the one who rebelled against God. He led a revolt against God; a third of the angels went with him. The devil didn't start out being the devil; he was Lucifer, the most beautiful angel God ever created. But he wasn't satisfied with being the most beautiful angel God ever created. He wanted to be God. He led a revolt against God. He is a rebel at heart.

And those who do his work are rebels too. So that's one of the first marks: they're not going to submit to authority. I talk about that a lot in sermons, the importance especially for parents to teach their children the importance of submitting to authority. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise, that it may go well with you and that you would live long on the earth. God teaches us from early on, He puts us in a situation where kids are supposed to learn to honor their parents.

If you don't submit to authority, you're going to have trouble your whole life. And some people, they don't submit to authority in the home; they don't listen to Mom and Dad, they don't listen to their teachers, they're constantly rebelling against any authority figure in their life. Well, that's a big, big problem. The devil is at work in that situation where someone won't submit to authority. And in a false teacher, that's one of the big things that you see: he's not submitted to authority. Secondly, false teachers are empty talkers.

He says that there are many rebellious men, empty talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision. Now these guys, just like in Corinth, just like in any of the places that the false teachers would go into, they were good at talking. They could sound really impressive, they could sound really persuasive. They would come in with this secret knowledge, with this new knowledge. They would talk about things that the people had never heard about before. He talks about Jewish myths.

And in First Timothy, he talks about genealogies and how some people like to take these studies and they say, "Well, words correspond to numbers and letters and then you work all this thing and the Bible has a code." It's all this stuff that's like, "Whoa, that sounds pretty cool." But the bottom line is it's empty. They're empty talkers. It's just a bunch of hot air. It may sound impressive, but there's no substance to it, there's no content to it.

It's kind of like when you have whipped cream on a dessert. Well, if you order pie with whipped cream but then they forget the pie, it's just whipped cream. Now Debbie and I have been on a diet, and so I'll take whipped cream. Just something that tastes sweet. But most of the time we want, if you're going to have whipped cream, there's got to be something there. And false teaching is just like that. It's just all whipped cream. It's gravy but there's no meat. And so Paul is saying, "Watch out, that person is an empty talker."

He's not submitted to anybody's authority, definitely not the authority of God. And if you really listen to what he has to say, there's nothing there. Peter talked about that in Second Peter chapter two, all about false teachers. He says that they are springs without water. A spring without water doesn't help you at all.

Larry Nobles: You're listening to From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Schreve today in the lesson Rebels and Rabble-Rousers from Pastor Jeff's series Setting the House in Order: A Study of the Book of Titus. Pastor Jeff will return in just a moment. But first, your church may need a fresh work of God, and you might need one as well. Revival begins when God's people are willing to return to Him. And right now, the world is more open than it's ever been for the Gospel.

Your support helps ensure that when hearts are ready, the truth is there: clear, biblical, and life-changing. We are deeply grateful to God for you and for the role you play in proclaiming real truth during this God-given window of opportunity. For your gift this month of any amount, we'd like to send you Pastor Jeff's five-lesson series Soul on Fire: God's Plan for Revival. It will empower you to seek His face first and return to your first love. Call 866-40-BIBLE and request the series Soul on Fire when you make that gift of any amount. That's 866-402-4253 or go to FromHisHeart.org. And when you do, we'll send you the series in the format of your choice. Now let's get back to today's lesson, Rebels and Rabble-Rousers.

Dr. Jeff Schreve: I had an email from a guy not too long ago, and he told me he was going to a church with a very well-known pastor. And he said, "I feel really good going there, but I'm not learning anything. I'm not getting anything. I'm just being jazzed up emotionally, but there's nothing there." And he was very complimentary. He said he found our program on the radio, I think, and he said, "I started listening and there was something there, there was substance there," because I try and preach the word of God.

The word of God is what gives substance, not just a rah-rah pep rally. And so that's the second thing you look for: is there substance here or is it just empty talk? And it says also that they are upsetting people's faith. One of the other marks: it's not just that they're willing to submit to authority, it's not just that they're empty talkers, but number three: they're upsetting to people's faith. Now what is a teacher supposed to do? He's supposed to build up people in the faith.

But these guys weren't building anybody up. They were upsetting whole families. Now remember, back in the early church, they had house churches and the church would meet in people's houses. And so it would be easy to upset whole families because whole families would be there. And so these teachers would come in and they would have their teaching, and here's what their teaching mainly focused on: it had a mixture of Jewish ceremonies and dietary laws and circumcision.

Because he says they're mainly coming from the circumcision, they're mainly Jews, Jews that had supposedly become Christians. They would call themselves Christians, but they still had all their Judaism that they brought in. And they're talking to Gentiles on the island of Crete and they'd say, "Well, yeah, but you've trusted Jesus, but let me tell you, you need more than just Jesus. Jesus is not sufficient by Himself. You need to add in the Jewish customs, you need to add in the dietary laws, you need to add in all our external ceremony. And you need to learn about these things that we have from Judaism."

And they'd have these Jewish myths. And it really, when you boil it down, false teaching always has with it: Jesus is not sufficient. So it's Jesus plus something else that is needed for you to really be this Christian that God wants you to be. There are churches all around like that. There are denominations like that where they're teaching, when you boil it down, it's Jesus plus your good works, Jesus plus something else you do, Jesus plus X, Y, and Z, and that will get you to heaven.

And the X, Y, and Z is all on you, and so you have to work for your salvation. That's a lie. That's a lie from hell. The Bible says it's not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us. So that they would come in and they'd upset people's faith. Sometimes you can hear somebody teach and he's teaching right things, and it shakes you to the core because it's things that you believed that all of a sudden now they're being stripped away and you're seeing from the word of God that maybe what I believed for all these years, maybe that's not right.

That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing if it's coming from the word. But there are the false teachers out there who cause people to doubt the word of God, cause people to question. Seminaries have been filled with false teachers who cause people—they come to seminary and they're so on fire for the Lord, and they come and then the Doctor So-and-So, who seems so learned and so wise, he starts to cast doubt on the word of God. He starts to say, "Well, you really can't believe the book of Genesis, and surely there weren't just two people, Adam and Eve."

That kind of thing. I had a seminary professor like that. He and I didn't get along all that well. But you can influence people and you can cause them not to grow in their faith; you cause them to doubt their faith. And you upset them. And that's a big mark of a false teacher: he doesn't build people up, he tears them down. And they walk away and at the end of the day they're scratching their head saying, "I don't know how much of this stuff I can believe at all."

The goal of preaching from a true preacher is to help you see that God is able. No matter what your situation, you trust God and His word is true, and you can count on Him. And it's as the scripture says in verse nine, it's the faithful word, the true word, the sure word, the word that you can base your whole life on. Let God be found true though every man be found a liar, the Bible says. Every word of God is tested, the scripture says.

And so teaching that is right builds up your faith. Teaching that is wrong begins to erode away your faith and it upsets people's faith. And they were deceiving people, and why were they deceiving them? It says in verse 11: "for the sake of sordid gain." This is the next point about a false teacher: they're greedy. They care about money. They are, as one preacher said, prophets—P-R-O-P-H-E-T—for profit—P-R-O-F-I-T. It's all about money.

They just look at people out there and they think, "What can I say to them that will get them to give me money?" And false prophets are really good at that. False teachers, they are really good at that. They're good at looking at people and figuring out how to get to their pocketbook and how to get their money because that's their motivation. They do it all for the sake of greed, of sordid gain. Such a contrast.

When Paul told Titus, he said, "Hey, when you look for the overseer, the bishop, the pastor, the elder that's going to be over these churches," verse seven, he says, "they have to be men who are not fond of sordid gain." They're not consumed with greed. They're not doing this for the money. But the false guys are doing it all for money because that's all they care about is the money.

And then he says that they're liars. I love verse 12. He says one of themselves, a prophet of their own, said this: "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons." This testimony is true. Now what is Paul talking about? Who said this? Well, there was a Greek philosopher, poet, his name was Epimenides, and he lived in the sixth century BC. And he was the one who came up with this phrase: "Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons."

Not just beasts and gluttons, but evil beasts and lazy gluttons. And Paul says that testimony is true. Crete was known for lying. That was one of the things about that island that everybody knew about Cretans—well, they're liars and they're beasts and they're lazy gluttons. That was well, well known. Now, it was so well known that there was a Greek verb—I wrote it down, let me see if I can pronounce it correctly—but there was a Greek verb Kretizo. And that meant to lie.

So if somebody used the Greek term Kretizo, it meant to lie, it meant to cheat. It was based on Crete because so many people from Crete were liars. In Corinth, they had a Greek word—Corinth was known for prostitution and there was a Greek word to "Corinthianize". And if you used that Greek term "to Corinthianize", everybody knew what you were talking about. That's what Corinth was known for. Well, Crete was known for lying.

And the reason that they said that is because in Crete you had a tomb and it was supposedly the tomb of Zeus, who's the highest of the Greek gods. And Crete said, "Yeah, Zeus is buried here." And they said, "Well, how can Zeus be buried here since he's a god? He doesn't die." And so they said, "See, that just proves you guys are liars. You have the body of Zeus? Well, Zeus is a god; he doesn't die." They supposedly had his tomb and his body.

And so Paul picks up on that. They knew about that. He said that's true of the false teachers: they're liars. They don't tell you the truth. They tell you what they think you want to hear. They'll lie to you. Why? Because they want your money. They're in it for sordid gain.

Larry Nobles: You're listening to From His Heart with Pastor Jeff Schreve, and as we've learned today in part one of the message Rebels and Rabble-Rousers, greed is just one of several traits that identify the false teachers and the wolves in sheep's clothing that come into the church and stir things up. This message is just one of eight in the powerful and practical series from Pastor Jeff called Setting the House in Order: A Study of the Book of Titus. You can order a complete copy of this series in the format of your choice when you go to FromHisHeart.org; just click the listen link for today's broadcast.

Rebels and rabble-rousers in the church can squash a revival in a heartbeat. Are you aware of those that are in your church that are doing just that? Do you personally need a revival? This month, our special gift of thanks is Pastor Jeff's series Soul on Fire: God's Plan for Revival. And in it, he shares God's plan to bring the wanderer—maybe that's you—back into the fullness of a relationship with God. You'll discover how you can do that and be revived and have a soul on fire when you call 866-40-BIBLE. Again, it's for a gift of any amount to From His Heart this month.

Thank you for standing with us. And thank you for joining us today on From His Heart. I'm Larry Nobles, trusting you'll be right back here tomorrow for part two of Rebels and Rabble-Rousers. That's when Pastor Jeff Schreve will open up God's word and share real truth, real love, and real hope from God's heart. Here on From His Heart.

From His Heart is the viewer-supported broadcast ministry of Dr. Jeff Schreve, who believes that no matter how badly you may have messed up in life, God still loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. For more information, visit FromHisHeart.org.