Take your Bible with you tonight and turn to 1 Timothy chapter six. We are going to look at just a couple of verses and we're going to talk about the subject of false teachers tonight.

I was originally planning on teaching verses 3 through 10, but it kind of turns into two subjects. Part of these verses are about false teachers and part of them are about contentment. I want to give contentment its own time so we're going to talk just about the false teachers portion tonight that is in verses 3-5.

One day this week I took Mollie out for a drive. She's learning to drive and she needs lots of hours. We went in my car and rode all the way to Windsor and then through Sullivan. She really wanted to go to Rural King so we went to the Rural King store. She went in to get some kettle corn at the C&C Kettle Corn Place.

Now I love the guy who owns the C&C Kettle Corn Place, named Shannon. He is somebody who was saved out of a life of crime and I believe he loves the Lord. He sometimes gets into these different ideas and he decided he wanted to talk to me that day about why Christians still had to follow the Old Testament law.

We went around and around on this for quite a while, probably 40 minutes, until my wife called and said, "Where are you guys?" I had my opportunity to leave.

I say that because there are people all over the place who will teach you all kinds of kooky heretical doctrines. These are doctrines that are well outside the mainstream of what Christians who believe the Bible have believed through history.

The people that teach these doctrines tend to be people that love the Bible. At least they seem to love the Bible, but listening to them can send you down a bad path.

Many of people that are converted, for instance, into the Jehovah's Witness cult are people who are in Baptist or otherwise evangelical churches. What happens is people who don't know their Bibles hear an idea from somebody who seems to love the Bible and love the Lord. They go down a rabbit hole and end up very far from the core teachings of Scripture.

So it's important for us to be able to identify and know what to do with false teachers. And that's what these verses and much of 1 Timothy actually talk about.

Let’s read our text. 1 Timothy 6:3-5:

[3] If any man teach otherwise, and consent not to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which is according to godliness;
[4] He is proud, knowing nothing, but doting about questions and strifes of words, whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings,
[5] Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds, and destitute of the truth, supposing that gain is godliness: from such withdraw thyself.
1 Timothy 6:3-5 (KJV)

These are short verses but they do tell us a lot about how to tell who false teachers are and what we're supposed to do with them.

So let's pray and we'll dive into these verses and hopefully understand better how to deal with them.

{pray}

The vast majority of these verses talk about...

1. How to know false teachers

This is really the meat of the message tonight, and there are four things I think these verses tell us about how to know if someone's a false teacher or not. The first one's pretty obvious...

A. You can know false teachers by their teaching.

The verse says, "If any man teach otherwise.” False teachers are teaching novel things. They are teaching things that are outside the realm of Christian doctrine.

Anytime somebody says, "I've got something that all the other Christians miss," that is a giant red flag. That should be like a strobing light that says, "Watch out. Stay away. Proceed with caution."

There are some areas where there is genuine disagreement among Bible-believing Christians. I can think of:

• Calvinism and Arminianism (election)
• Eschatology (the study of the end times and prophecy)
• Ecclesiology (how a church is supposed to be run, whether a church is supposed to have one pastor or a board of elders, whether churches are independent or together)
  I don't know that those things are absolutely crystal clear in the Scripture.

That's a very small percentage of Christian doctrine. On the vast majority of things, Bible-believing Christians throughout the ages have generally agreed on what true Christian teaching is and on what the Bible clearly and plainly says.

Every week I read dozens of commentaries written by faithful preachers. Some of them are old, some of them are new. Some are Independent Baptist, some are Presbyterian, and some are Pastor Bible Churches. For the most part they all agree on the plain meaning of Scripture. You can go back and read the writings of the reformers from the Reformation. While I don't agree with everything from the reformers, on most things we would agree.

Whenever somebody says, "I know better than all of these people," that is a red flag. They are most likely about to teach you false doctrine.

The second thing it says about their teaching is that they don't consent to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, into the doctrine which is according to godliness.

So not only are they teaching new things but they are opposing and rejecting the clear teaching of Scripture.

There are many, many, many ways that somebody could do this. Just like there are many ways that somebody could counterfeit currency. The best antidote for the Christian is to know what the Bible says. If you know what the Bible says and what the wholesome words that produce godliness are, then you're going to be able to spot a fake, to spot a phony, better.

So look out for false teachers and you can know false teachers by their doctrine. The next thing these verses teach us is:

B. You can know false teachers by their attitude.

Verse 4 says, "He is proud." So one attitude that you can find in false teachers is pride.

This makes a lot of sense. It takes a lot of arrogance to think that you know better than all of the people that God has used throughout history. It takes a lot of arrogance to say, "Everybody else gets the Bible wrong but I get it right." That's pride. That's arrogance.

They're not just proud with their attitude but they're ignorant. They have arrogance and ignorance.

In my experience arrogance and ignorance often go together. Some of the people who know the least are the most proud of what they know. Some people are proud of their ignorance. They're proud that they don't know anything.

I don’t always agree with John MacArthur, but I love what he said about this. He said:

Those who know and believe the Word of God have far more insight into spiritual reality than the most educated heretic.

They're proud. They don't know anything. What else does verse 4 teach us about their attitude? There's an interesting phrase: "But doting about questions and strifes of words."

There's a lot of words I had to look up and study in these verses. One of them is this phrase: "doting about questions and stripes of words." The word "doting" is a word that means sickness. It's a sickness of the mind. What it means, what it's saying, is that people that are false teachers have a sick fascination with questions and little word battles.

Have you ever talked to somebody who was kind of off on the deep end somewhere? They would always be like, "What about this word? What about this word?" Instead of focusing on what the Bible clearly says, they have this magnetic attraction, this unhealthy fascination with the things that they find questionable.

Beware of people who are more attracted to the question marks of Scripture than the exclamation points of Scripture. The Scripture says plenty of things that are crystal clear and important. Yes, there are things in there that are hard to understand and puzzling sometimes. Beware of people who focus on those things to the exclusion of the things the Bible clearly says, the important things of Scripture.

One time I was out with a preacher and looking at books, and he handed me a book. It was like "The Bible Code" or something like that. It was a book about how some preacher had supposedly used mathematics to determine the numerology of the scriptures. The numbers of the scriptures supposedly could tell you when JFK was going to be killed and when America was going to be founded. All this rubbish.

I remember I closed the book and handed them to him and said, "No thank you. The Bible has enough in it that is clear. I'm going to stay away from these question marks."

I have a saying I like to say: "We focus on revelation not on speculation."

But false teachers, it's the opposite. They're obsessed with speculation because they can fight about it.

You listen to them and instead of them talking about the Gospel and talking about Jesus, who is the theme of the Scripture, and talking about all the things the Bible so clearly says, they are obsessed with the little things. They're obsessed with the minutiae. They're obsessed with things that they can say, "Oh these people, they've got it wrong! They don't understand what this one word means or what this one passage means, and they've got everything wrong!"

So this is the attitude of false teachers. You can know them by their attitude of pride, ignorance, and this weird obsession with questionable things.

But verse 4 and verse 5 also tell us what this kind of false teacher produces. So not only can you know them by their teaching and know them by their attitude but also:

C. You can know false teachers by their audience.

Verse 4 says, "Whereof cometh envy, strife, railings, evil surmisings."

What the verse is saying is that when people are having a diet of this kind of false teaching, it's going to produce certain things in the audience, in their congregation. The first thing is envy, spiritual envy.

Envy is wanting what other people have. Whether it's physical things, monetary things, whether it's some position that other people have, envy.

Strife is just contention. It's infighting. It's grumbling against other people. False teaching doesn't produce godliness; it produces contention. It produces strife.

Railings is a word for speaking falsely or negative things about other people. It’s translated “blasphemy” or “speaking evil” in other places in the Bible.

When you are consuming a diet of false teaching, one of the things that's going to come of that is speaking negatively all the time about other people. You shouldn't speak negatively about them. You're going to be overly critical. It's another way of saying this.

The last thing it says here in this phrase is "evil surmisings." "Surmisings" is a word that means suspicions. It is basically inventing negative things about people. It's coming up with conspiracies about people.

You know in 1 Corinthians 13 it tells us that “charity thinketh no evil.” A godly person is not going to sit around imagining things that other people are doing wrong. A godly person is going to be giving people the benefit of the doubt. When somebody is constantly eating the diet of false teaching, they give themselves over to inventing conspiracies about other people.

Verse 5 tells us what these audiences are like, what these churches are like. “Perverse disputings of men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth.”

Imagine going to a church and instead of getting fed the Word of God, you hear a sermon about some crazy theory of the Word of God. It is about how everybody else is wrong, about how you need to do this and this and this if God is going to accept you. It is about how this preacher or that preacher is wicked.

There are two problems with that:

1. It is perverse disputings. You are literally feeding on trash. You are putting junk in your mind.
2. The second problem is just as bad. You're destitute of the truth. All that time talking about this weird stuff could be spent feeding people the Word of God.

Now I'm going to say something. I have been in churches before where the pastor went off the deep end a little bit. Instead of teaching what the Word of God clearly taught, he started to go down rabbit holes and jump onto hobby horses. A lot of time was spent criticizing other people and other churches.

Over time the church members in that church became envious. There was a lot of talk about, "Why does that person get to do this? Why can't I have what that person has?" They became critical of everything and critical of each other. They started to think that true religion meant chewing up other people. Some of the people got really into conspiracy theories.

Here is what they didn't realize: they were starving. They were starving for the good stuff: the Scripture that emphasizes Jesus and emphasizes the Gospel.

I'm going to use an illustration here. I hope it is not too insensitive but have you ever seen somebody who is addicted to drugs, who is addicted to meth or heroin? What happens to those people is they become very, very skinny. They become very malnourished looking. They are so high on this junk that they are starving themselves. And very often they end up aging by decades because of the way that they're living. You'll see some lady and you'll think, "Man, that lady is in her 50s" and she's actually in her early 30s because of the drugs.

False doctrine is like that. It's like a drug and people get high on it. They're like tweakers on false doctrine and they end up starving themselves and turning themselves into monsters. They don't realize that they are not eating the pure food of the Word of God.

These verses teach us that you can know false teachers by their teaching, by their attitude, and by their audience. There's one more thing that is sometimes a tell for false teachers, and it's also found in verse number 5.

It says, "Supposing that gain is godliness."

So, a fourth way that you can know false teachers is:

D. You can know false teachers by their motivation.

What this phrase means is that there are people out there who are just doing it to make money. There are people out there who are teaching because it's an easy way to line their pockets.

They are more in love with the fleece than the sheep.

Unfortunately this is just the truth. Many teachers are just in it for the money. Many books, radio broadcasts, podcasts, and even churches exist so people can make money.

How many churches would still exist if no money was to be made? How many people would still be preaching the Gospel if it was not their living?

I want to be careful here because the Bible teaches, in fact this very book teaches in the previous chapter, that preachers should be taken care of. The answer is not to say no pastors should ever be paid but the truth is there are always going to be grifters. There are always going to be people that want to build an audience because building an audience means building a comfortable income.

Think about some of these TV preachers that live in massive mansions, mansions far bigger than the size of our churches, that own their own private jets. That drive expensive luxury automobiles well beyond what normal people can afford. That wear expensive custom suits or more likely today expensive sneakers that cost $800-$900 and hipster casual clothes.

Those people are in it for the money. You take the money away and a lot of these churches just go away.

These verses tell us how to know false teachers.

1. We can know them by their teaching. Are they teaching something new? Are they rejecting what is true?
2. We can know them by their attitude: pride, ignorance, a sick fascination with questionable things.
3. We can know them by their audience. Good teaching produces good people. Bad teaching produces envy, strife, criticalness, and conspiracy theories.
4. We can know them by their motivation. Are they after money?

The second thing we can see from this verse is not just how we can identify false teachers but...

2. What to do with false teachers

It's going to be real short because it's just four words. At the end of verse 5 it says: "From such withdraw thyself."

Just stay away from them. Just leave those people alone. When somebody goes down this road and becomes a false teacher, stay away. Withdraw yourself.

Now I want to warn you that sometimes false teachers aren't behind pulpits. Sometimes false teaching moves through a church in little gossip groups or email chains. However you see it, however you come across it, you need to withdraw yourself. You need to stay away from false teachers.

When the cults come knocking on your door, don't answer it. Don't engage them. When somebody comes up to you and wants to talk about some new doctrine he found in the scripture and you realize it's something you've never heard before, then back away a little bit.

Because false teaching will ruin you. It'll ruin a church. It is a diversion from what God intends.