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The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor describes three interconnected anchors: a pure heart (foundational knowledge of God’s word), a good conscience (moral application of that knowledge), and sincere faith in Jesus. How do you see these three working together in your own spiritual life, and which one do you find yourself neglecting most?
The sermon uses the metaphor of swerving on black ice to describe how we drift from God’s path without intending to. What are some “patches of black ice” in your own life or in our culture that cause people to swerve unintentionally, and what habits help you stay alert to them?
Paul warns about a seared conscience—one so accustomed to sin that it no longer feels conviction. What are the warning signs that a conscience is becoming dull, and how can regular self-examination and prayer keep us sensitive to God’s leading?
The pastor contrasts the false teachers who sought status and recognition with the disciples’ later transformation through following Jesus. Where do you see the temptation to prioritize being seen or respected over genuinely loving and serving others, and what does the disciples’ story offer as encouragement?
The sermon challenges us to resist both digital and social algorithms that reward anger and a sense of superiority. What practical steps can you take this week to shift from engaging with rage-inducing content toward interactions and conversations that reflect God’s love as described in John 3:16?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Well, good evening and welcome to Steadfast. I am so glad to be with you tonight. As we continue our series, our charge is love. How often is it that we think we know where we’re going, we think we know what we’re doing, and things swerve in a different direction? I’ve been thinking about that this past week, because I think about that it’s been a year now since my back flared up, and I know many of you have been praying for me. I thank you for that over this past year, and it’s been an interesting journey.
But it all started with shoveling the driveway and not doing what you might think, picking up too much snow in the shovel or something along those lines. No, it was finishing the driveway and then slipping on a patch of ice afterwards. And suddenly, not paying attention because the work was done, I swerved in a different direction. I went someplace I didn’t think I was going. And that’s the challenge when you think about swerving.
We don’t swerve intentionally. We swerve unintentionally. We’re not expecting it. We don’t know it’s coming, and all of a sudden it hits, and we’re going a different way. How do we deal with that? Well, we need to keep our eyes on the path that’s actually safe, the path that we’re supposed to be on. If I had been watching the ground for black ice as I walked up the driveway, I wouldn’t have fallen, and I probably wouldn’t have hurt my back.
When we’re talking about doctrine, when we’re talking about being faithful to our Christian commission that God has given us, likewise, we need to keep our eyes fixed on him and his word. Because when we lift our eyes up and we’re looking other directions, we step on the black ice of sin and the forces of evil calling us in different directions. A lot of times it’s internal. Sometimes it’s the external pressures. But the problem is the same. There are a lot of things that want to make us swerve, including often our own hearts. And when we’re not paying attention, we’re prone to do it.
Let’s pray tonight that we wouldn’t do that, but that we would stay fixed on God’s safe path. Would you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for this evening. Thank you for your word. And as we think about what it is to be charged with the love that you have shown us, be charged to show that love, would you help us to be those who don’t swerve, but stay fixed on the path that you want us on? Would we pray this in Jesus’ precious name? Amen.
Let’s go ahead and turn to verse 5. “But the aim of our instruction is love,” or maybe better translated, “But the end of our charge is love, that comes from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.” I like that alternative translation. It really captures the sense of the words and picks up on that theme that Paul keeps coming back to of a command being passed down from officer to officer. That’s our purpose.
What does it mean to have a charge of love? What does that mean? What does it mean for that to be the end? Well, we’re going to explore that, but first we need to think about how we get there. And that’s what Paul starts with here. He says there’s three things that we need to be concerned with. We need to have, if you just look back here again, just look at these now. Where’s this charge coming from? It’s from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith.
Sincere faith, that’s a bit clearer. It’s a bit more obvious how that is different. But what about those other two? Well, when we think about the heart, the heart is where we store up God’s word. And commentators think, and I think this is really kind of helpful to make the distinction here, that with the heart, Paul is talking about that Old Testament sense of storing up God’s word in our hearts and following him. In other words, what we’re really talking about there is the foundation. What do we build everything else on? If we’re going to follow Jesus, if we’re going to believe in him, first we need to know who he is, what he does for us. We need to have that foundation in our hearts.
So then what’s the conscience? Well, the conscience is really the application of that. It’s a much more Greek concept, but one where Paul, as he’s speaking to both Greek and Jew alike, Jew and Gentile, he’s pulling these both in and saying, well, they both describe an aspect of what we’re supposed to do. And that second one is that we actually have that moral sensibility of how we apply what it is that we have in that foundation. We can know all kinds of stuff about God. Satan himself knows all kinds of stuff about God. But do we just know stuff or is it actually changing us? Is it actually alive in us?
And critically here, Paul wants us to keep in mind that this is something that we need to tend and take care of, by God’s grace, of course, but we need to be aware of it. For example, if we looked just a little further in 1 Timothy chapter 4, verse 2, Paul talks about those who have had their consciences branded or seared. And there it seems like he has this idea of a conscience that’s so inclined to do evil because it just keeps doing it. Maybe at first it felt bad about it, but it keeps doing it to the point that it no longer is even aware of it. It has a scar there and it just doesn’t even feel anything. It’s just seared.
And Paul says we need to be aware that that can happen. We need a healthy foundation and a healthy conscience to implement that. Lots of the people throughout scripture knew what they should do and didn’t and so it is today with those around us and, painfully to admit, with us. How often is it that we know what we should do and we don’t do it? We don’t want our conscience seared or branded by sin. So that’s the second part of fulfilling this charge of love.
The third is a sincere faith because everything we’ve been saying up to this point, it could be this really nice little legalistic package. No good laws. Do those good laws and you’re set, right? No. You need to have a sincere faith. And this is what controls everything else. What do we mean by sincere faith? Does that mean I have a faith that’s strong enough that I’ve built it up well? No. What it means is that I actually believe in Jesus. I don’t just believe that God’s law is a pretty good law that makes people good. I don’t just believe that some of the things in it are things that I want to do and I am doing and I feel convicted by my conscience to do. But that this is all guided by the fact that I believe in Jesus, that he is my Lord and my Savior. And if I have that, then those other two are going to be empowered by that. So they’re interconnected.
These are building pieces, but really that capstone of a sincere faith strengthens and enables those first two. And you have all three of these together, then understanding of what God teaches in his word, a desire to actually do it, and that all empowered by our Lord and Savior and the gift of the Holy Spirit that he gives us, empowered there, then we can go and fulfill our charge.
And crucially, that last part, the sincere faith, is what helps us to understand that charge because that charge is God’s love, it’s to show love, and how do we do that unless we understand that God loves us and just how much God loves us? After all, remember John 3:16, “For this is the way God loved the world. He gave his one and only Son so that everyone who believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.”
We know that verse, it’s a very familiar verse, but how often do we really live that verse? This is the reality of what God’s done for us, and so this is the reality of how we want to live towards others, that we love others so much that just as God loved the world enough to do this, that we love the world enough because we want to love as God loves that we would do the same.
Of course, we can’t save anyone by giving up ourselves, but we can tell people about the one who can save them, and we can love them enough that even when it’s inconvenient, even when we disagree with them, even when we just don’t want to, that we still say, but God loves that person, and that person needs Jesus just as much as I do. Not more in the sense that I say, well, you know, yeah, they need a lot of Jesus, unlike me. No. We all need Jesus just the same. We’re all loved by God, and do we see that, do we understand that’s the mission that God’s placed us on, to go and love, that that’s what we want to have our lives be about, and that’s what Paul’s talking about here.
We need all three of these. If we love Jesus and we want people to know about Jesus, but we have no idea who Jesus is, we have no idea what he’s done for us, we have no idea about God’s law that we haven’t been following rightly, it’s going to be very hard to convey God’s love to people. If we know God’s law and we love Jesus, but we don’t have any desire to do his will, well, actually it’s kind of hard to understand if we really love Jesus then, right? Not saying we always do God’s will, but if we don’t desire to, if our conscience isn’t screaming when we don’t, there’s a problem there, right?
In other words, what Paul’s saying here is you need these three pieces, not because we’re going to do some works to save ourselves, but because to be effective as Christians, we need the whole fleet going in the right direction, not swerving around in different directions.
A video went viral last year of someone who really knew where he or she wanted to get off, but missed it. We’ve all been in this situation. This is an Ohio Department of Transportation video, and you’re about to see what we’ve all done. We’re driving down the road, we’re going along with the traffic, and we realize we’re not over for our exit.
And so you can see this vehicle just says, well, I’m not going to miss it. I’m not paying attention to how everyone else is driving, how I’m supposed to be driving, how the traffic’s flowing. I just want my exit. And maybe the driver was looking at that traffic going the other way. It seemed inconvenient to keep aligned with the traffic and maybe it kind of works that vehicle to get off, but look at what’s left behind here. There’s a pileup here, people who are going to lose a lot of time and go through a lot of suffering because one part of the flow of traffic wasn’t going as it was supposed to.
For a highway to function, we all need to be going in the same direction, right? We all need to be going towards the goal of that set of lanes. And likewise, when we think about ourselves, we need to have a heart that’s going towards God. Our conscience is going towards God and we need all that directed by the only thing that only one who can truly direct it, God’s spirit. We don’t have those three things all moving in the same direction, but we’re saying, why am I not an effective Christian? Why am I not doing what God’s called me to do? Or, or why isn’t the church?
Well, those are the things we should be looking at. Do we love what God loves? Are we seared in the conscience where we’ve become dull to it? And are there places we need to pray, God, show me where, where I’m missing your goal where I just don’t even care anymore? And most of all, are we just going through the motions or do we love Jesus? And that’s why we’re doing it.
These are the things we need to make sure are coming back together. Everything’s going in the right way. One of those is off and there’s going to be a bunch of accidents.
Now I want to be utterly clear, Paul isn’t saying, and I’m not saying that if we don’t always do God’s law, we’re not going to be saved. Or if we don’t always understand God’s law that we’re not going to be saved. This isn’t about salvation. This is about actually going a step further and saying, okay, now that I’m saved, how do I do what I’m supposed to do? How do I fulfill my purpose? That’s what he’s instructing Timothy on. How does the church fulfill his purpose? And we need everything going in the right way so that we go a step further beyond I’m saved to I’m living as God wants me to live. And I’m actually able to rejoice in that because now I’m doing what I was made to do.
We’re going to swerve. But if we’re anchored well, it’s like putting those ice cleats on the bottoms of your shoes so you don’t slip. When we’re looking at God’s word and soaking in his law, when we’re constantly praying and asking God to help us not to be seared in the conscience, when we’re focused on loving Jesus, are we still going to make mistakes? Yes. Can you do everything possible right to avoid slipping on the ice and still fall? Yes. But are you going to fall as often? No.
Now, this is in contrast to the people that are Paul’s opponents. And if you turn to verse six, some have strayed from these and turned away to empty discussion. They want to be teachers of the law, but they do not understand what they are saying or the things they insist on so confidently.
Paul’s saying, you can see these teachers over here and over here, and they’re all calling at us saying, you should follow us. He says, but look at what they’re actually trying to do. What is their purpose? Well, he says it right in verse seven, their purpose is they want to be teachers. They want to be recognized for what they do. This is something we should fear in ourselves and when we see it in other people, when their main reason for doing something is they want to be seen doing it, be known for it.
Unless what we want to be known for is loving people, loving God. If that’s our goal, then that’s a pretty good goal. But if our goal is, I want to be seen as an important teacher of how to love God, or I want to be seen as someone who is a really good, civic-minded person that everyone respects or something, that’s not what we’re supposed to do.
And the problem is when the status, how we’re recognized, becomes our focus, our charge isn’t love, but pride. And oftentimes that pride covers up a huge problem, which is what Paul identifies in these teachers he sees all over the place in the church as he instructs Timothy. They don’t understand. They don’t actually have God’s law soaked up in their hearts. Their consciences are seared where they can’t see when their pride is what’s driving them. They can’t see when their other sinful desires are what’s driving them and allowing them to distort God’s word. And really they’re not about loving Jesus, they’re about loving themselves.
So those three key members of the fleet of purpose, well, they’re swerving all over the place in them because they’re not about actually being focused on God’s direction, the right lanes of the road. They just see the exit they want, importance. And sort of like the exit ramp, you think about it, if you actually do what God’s called you to do, you may never have recognition. You may never be important. But there may be times where other people recognize it and you do become important.
But the more we focus on that exit and not just staying on the right part of the road, the harder it is actually to get to the exit and the more wreckage we cause as we try to do so. These people are known to be teachers because they chatter, as Paul says, but it’s a meaningless chatter. Maybe they have these big, long, obtuse arguments about theology and, you know, it sounds impressive. Sounds really impressive. Other people say, wow, look how smart these people are. I feel smarter just listening because they sound so smart. And those teachers walk home at night and they feel pretty good about themselves. Why? Because they’ve said impressive things. Who are they trying to impress? Well, themselves. People around them, not God. So they’re not worried about actually saying what’s true.
As one commentator put it, they have met their own intellectual satisfaction. They haven’t been loving. It’s not loving to say things that we make confusing just so people find us impressive. It’s not loving to say things that distort God’s will because it somehow affirms us or other people. Not loving. They’re not focusing people on the true Savior.
And so they might gain a following. They might have status. They might even have more status than the people that do what God’s called them to do. But they’re causing wreckage in people’s lives. The cars are just swerving around.
Think about the disciples. Think about them for a moment. They’re like this early on. They’re like this when we see them in the Gospels. In a place like the Last Supper, take a look at Luke 22:24 to 27. “The dispute also started among them over which of them was to be regarded as the greatest. So Jesus said to them, the kings of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in authority over them are called benefactors. Not so with you. Instead, the one who is greatest among you must become like the youngest and the leader like the one who serves. For who is greater, the one who is seated at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is seated at the table? But I’m among you as one who serves.”
Jesus says don’t be focused on status. And keep in mind here, the disciples, this is the Last Supper. We’re going to get to Holy Week in a few weeks, and we think about the solemnness of this and the darkness of that night and so on. And what are the disciples doing? They’re arguing over, well, am I the greatest? Is he the greatest? Who’s the greatest? Who’s going to have the most status? They’re doing what Paul’s talking about here.
But crucially, they don’t stay there. Through the help of the Holy Spirit, through God working in them, through following Jesus, what happens? That’s not the way the disciples end. We look at their stories, we look at their, many of them being martyred, all of them giving up normal lives to go and proclaim the gospel. What do we see in them? We see a totally different attitude than what’s there at the Last Supper, because the Spirit transforms them.
And that should give us some hope if we see some of ourselves in these false teachers. And if we’re really allowing God to probe our conscience and to point out those seared places, we’re going to, because we’re not perfect. There is hope, because we see as God works in our lives, we don’t have to stay there. What Paul’s saying here is understand what’s really important and keep yearning for that.
And I think that’s the thing we see: the disciples watch Jesus go to the cross and triumph over death and afterwards, and then come back and commission them and send them off and they start to be led by the Spirit. They don’t get it all at once, but as they seek after Jesus, what do they get? They want to be like him. Even when they’re not, I know they’d say, I’m not like Jesus. I’m not like my Savior, but I sure want to be, and Lord help me to be. We can do the same.
I think a starting point is to refuse to participate in the things that we all want to participate in in our culture that are not like Jesus.
As this ends, more than likely, whichever streaming service you’re on, I know certainly YouTube and Facebook both are going to try to put you in another video. They might kick you off into reels on Facebook, and if you’ve been watching some Bible teaching videos, you may very well get kicked off into a reel on Bible teaching. That Bible teaching video might be great. I have no idea where it’s going to send you, but it also might try to be one of those videos.
There’s a lot of them, and they go over really well on reels where someone’s talking about all the things that are bad about other people that the Bible condemns. And let me be clear. We should teach God’s law, and we should insist on his moral standards. We should do it in the right way, and these videos are framed in a particular way. It makes us mad. It makes us give a like and a heart and a comment that says, look at those awful people. And it does that because the algorithm, the thing that decides what we see on these social networks, knows that if we’re angry, we’re going to click more. We’re going to watch longer.
It’s really just a disturbing but true insight into our human psyche, that we like being superior feeling, that we want to be those who can rage at others, not those who are raged against. We want to be those who can point out the flaws in others, not those who run into the flaws in ourselves. And guess what? That’s exactly what the people Paul is talking about as being false teachers liked in their own time too. It hasn’t changed.
They may not have had fancy computer algorithms, but when the social network was people standing in the town square talking, the encouragement was the same. You rile the people up against the other, and yeah, they’re going to get mad, and they’re going to like you because you’re helping them feel important too. You tell them about how they need to be convicted in their own hearts and minds and be transformed and be more like Jesus, and they’re going to do, well, what, for example, the town council did when John Calvin’s reformation in Switzerland started. They kicked him out of town. Why? Because we don’t like hearing about how we need to reform.
The algorithm of our lives and online encourages us to act like these false teachers. But if we say, but Jesus, I don’t want to be like this anymore. I want to be like the disciples later in life when they actually were following you. Well, what we can say is, I don’t want in on their algorithm anymore. And when we feel that building up in us and we feel important, we say, God, I don’t want to be important. I want to be like you.
The teachers, they were confident and bold. It feels good. But they were wrong. They were getting built up, but they weren’t building up others. They had other people following. Those people felt important too. They say, ah, they’re being built up. They’re being built up in a way that caused more swerving. So not really built up. And ultimately not really focused on God.
If you just look in the church today, a significant portion of the teaching that we will hear online and books is about doing the exact same thing today. The challenge hasn’t changed. That’s why Paul gives us this timeless charge that he passed to Timothy to be passed on to generation after generation all the way to us.
We need to remember that our charge is love. Yes, we see the sin in the world. And what do we do about it? Our goal isn’t to make people really good legalistic atheists, or at least functional atheists, where they don’t really know Jesus, but they do the right thing. Our goal is to have people meet the living Savior. And as they meet him, yeah, he’s going to change their lives. But what we want is for people to know Jesus.
Is that what we’re focused on? Do we care more about how our culture looks, how the people around us look and sound? Or do we care more about everyone that we encounter actually knowing Jesus? That’s our charge.
Every time we start to swerve, here’s what we need to go back to, John 3:16. What did God do for this world? He loved it so much he gave his one and only Son for us. If every time we want to be angry and rage, we say, well, God had a whole lot more reason to be angry. God could look around this world and see all kinds of reasons to rage, and he didn’t need to build up a group of people that affirmed him. He could just wipe out the current people and make new people. What did God do? He loved.
Our charge is love, and our charge is clear because God has shown it to us. And in this hurting world, may we be those who show it to others. Would you pray with me, please? Father, thank you for your love. Thank you for showing us what it means to love. And thank you for transforming us through that love, giving us the hope of salvation through that love. Lord, would you help us to cling to that? Would you help us to turn down the rage and the anger and the self-building up and be about the business of showing your love? Would you help us to be people that if someone else were asked to summarize what we talk about and what we care about, they’d be about how much God loves the people he has made, not all the other things that they probably would list, that we’re all guilty of leaning into rather than into your love.
Would you make us a people of love, fulfilling the charge whose end is love? We pray this in Jesus’ precious name. Amen.
Well, I hope this has been an encouragement to you, and if it has, I sure would appreciate if you’d give us a like and a share. Yes, I know I just talked about algorithms. Let’s pervert that algorithm. Let’s do what it doesn’t intend to do. Instead of promoting rage and engagement and more and more of the same bad things, let’s actually fool it into promoting something that’s about God’s love. We can do that right now. Click like, click share, leave a comment. All those things make a difference, and it says we care more about something other than just being angry. We care more about God’s truth, that foundation, that conscience, and the Savior whom we have faith in.
Thank you for helping to do that, and it’s not just about social media. We need to go and do that this week. Let’s pray about how we do that. One way might be to invite someone to a service where we get to reflect on where we fall short and where God picks us up and transforms us, and that’s Ash Wednesday. I hope that you’ll come and join us for Ash Wednesday. It’s this Wednesday, 7 p.m. Central Time. We would love to have you.
And I realize some of you, maybe you feel great about Ash Wednesday. You’ve grown up with it. You’ve always gone to it, and some of you might be thinking, what is this thing? Is it some kind of magical thing with ashes? What in the world is it that we’re talking about here? It’s really just a time to reflect and repent on our failures and to see the mercy and the love of God and to experience it and to prepare our hearts for the celebration of Easter through that. It’s an incredibly biblical thing to spend time repenting, and that’s what we’ll be doing.
But it’s also a time to consider inviting someone else, someone who maybe doesn’t normally come to church but feels like Ash Wednesday is something that he or she doesn’t want to miss. It’s a wonderful gospel opportunity. Invite that person. Hey, come with me to Ash Wednesday service, and we’ll soak in the gospel together.
In the meantime, any way I can be praying for you, please do text us at 833-356-4032. That’s 833-356-4032, or leave a comment in the comments below. I would love to pray for you and encourage you in any way I can. As we do that, what happens? Well, we can encourage each other. If you’re feeling discouraged, just text that line, 833-356-4032. Or if you’re willing to share it, leave it in the broader group, and when God’s people come together, we strengthen and build up each other. That’s what our calling is.
Hope you have a wonderful and blessed week. I’ll see you hopefully on Wednesday, and again right back here next Monday.
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