Let us turn to our Bibles to 2 Timothy chapter 3. 2 Timothy chapter 3. 2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 2 and 4. Although I went over up to verse 9 last week, a lot of the sermon was over explaining what the last days were. And here I will be going further into other parts of the text. Let us listen attentively to the word of God.
2 Timothy chapter 3, verses 9 and 10. And perhaps within our hearts and our lives and within the church. Gracious God, it’s a sad thing, of course, to see.
May we learn in particular, Lord, of the dangers. Paul describes here perilous times and describes those dangers, the perilous situation, which is these kind of sins and other sins, to be sure, whatever they may be today. And therefore, may we learn the lesson to avoid these dangers, to flee them.
And one way, I hope we see this morning, is to see some of the practical effects sin and transgressions and wickedness have upon our lives and the lives of those we love. And therefore, may this move us further and closer to loving you more than loving the world, we pray. Amen.
Paul’s description of the times of Timothy, known as the last days, in which we are today as well, I’ll remind you from last week’s sermon, he lists a number of notable sins. Some of the list was written about beforehand in 1 Timothy. And the particular sins here are not necessarily, to remind you, the only problems that we will encounter today.
There’s an approach to the Bible sometimes that we may fall into. I know I have. You read this text and go, well, I guess those are the only sins I should be concerned about.
Of course not. It may be whatever you have a predilection towards or temptations that are unique to you or your family or even our society. These are the problems that Paul thought were significant for them at his time.
Rather, the list here is about pressing matters of Timothy’s church. Of course, many are relevant today in one degree or another. And so I wish to highlight the collection of transgressions here in particular, I think are especially relevant to us today about love.
Out of these sins, depending on how I suppose you classify or relate them together, they are at least different enough that Paul has different words and describes them, to be sure. But there’s a lot of overlap, I think. And here especially is love or the abuse of love or the misuse of love. Love of oneself, love of money, love of pleasure, in contrast to, at the very end here in verse 4, the love of God.
Dangers of Loving Oneself
And so the first point here is the dangers of loving one’s self. And before I get into that, remind us of the different uses of the word love.
That is, they have different words for the same word of love to describe different perspectives, as it were, descriptions or emphases of a way of love as practiced or used in life. Not always. Sometimes they’re almost used synonymously, these particular Greek words, probably recognize some of them.
The first word is agape, which is not used in this text. That’s not the word here for love in these three texts and the other word for unloving, not agape. That could be simply described as the love of preciousness.
It’s the most used word in New Testament, so that’s very much emphasized over and over again by Paul and others. We are to love in this sense of the preciousness of, of course, God and of the church. Love one another, we’re told over and over again.
And that’s the word agape. It is a commitment, therefore, and a recognition of the preciousness of Christ, and of course, of Christ in all of us as believers baptized in his name. The other word, which at this time, historically, interestingly enough, if you are into going over the history and usage of Greek words, which a pastor would be, of course, more interested in that.
A work by B.B. Warfield goes over this, I don’t know, 80 pages long, and he points out that at this time in God’s providence, Philea, heard that word as in Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love, or friendship, sometimes it’s translated as. Philea was an eclipse while agape is ascending. Before this time, Philea was used as almost a common usage of the word for love, like we use, well, we almost only have one word, love, for the word love.
It’s often associated, as I said, with friendship, and it’s, therefore, tends to emphasize, again, not always, these words aren’t airtight distinctions all the time, but tends to emphasize common interests. And so this could be described as a love of pleasantness, as opposed to, or distinct from, not opposed or against, preciousness, a pleasantness. Because, of course, if you marry your spouse, you want them to be precious more than just pleasant.
You can have lots of pleasant friendships, but you’re not going to marry them, and you don’t want to be that way with them. So you can see kind of the relationship and differences there. It’s the second most used Greek word in the New Testament for love.
And there are three words, interestingly enough, used with the compound of the word Philea, three or four words. Here we have it for pleasure or excessive desire in this particular place. Lovers of themselves is one word there in the Greek, it’s a compound word, we would call it in English, and it emphasizes one’s self, or excessive desires for one’s self in particular.
And so we would perhaps certainly call it something along the lines of selfishness. You’re just thinking about yourself, it’s all about yourself, and the like. Now, the summary here of the wrong kinds of love I put under the heading, if you notice the title of the sermon is about loving the world, and that word isn’t used in this text.
I wanted to have a description describe loving yourself, loving money, loving pleasantness, or pleasures of what? Of this world, that’s clearly what he’s talking about. The things around us or within us. And you get that from 1 John 2.15. So I’m using the word world here in the title of the sermon as a summary of all this misuse of love, and abuse of love, or turning love into sin, or lust, and the like, and coveting.
1 John 2.15, we read, do not love the world or what? The things in the world, like yourself, money, and pleasure. So it fits under the category of world in this moral sense. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him, John tells us.
And so the world then by John’s usage means everything unrighteously used, or abused, or even existing as such, outside of Christ’s kingdom. For the material things especially, over and over again, if you recall, I suppose it’s probably out there, someone put a list of all the particular sins in the New Testament. It’d be kind of interesting to go through.
Many of them are very concrete, even in this list here. Traitors, that’s clearly something you did or said in breaking your relationship and a promise. Being unforgiving has outward manifestations and actions.
Fornication, as we know in adultery, mentioned a number of times in the New Testament. Those are clear outward acts of sin that others can be aware of. Blasphemers as well, being disobedient and the like towards parents.
These are misuse, excessive use of the things of this world. Loving these things more than God is clearly the contrast here in verse 4. Lovers of pleasure, and I’m sure we can by good and necessary consequence put in lovers of themselves, lovers of money, lovers of anything in this world, rather than lovers of God. That’s the contrast there.
And so I’m using the phrase loving this world to include all this sinful use of love. The dangers of loving this world then, or more broadly, so summarizing all of it as it were, is there in verse 1. He describes all these things as perilous times we find ourselves in, either through unrighteous acts, of course, or thoughts and words and deeds, from selfishness to blasphemy and everything else in this less and more, that clearly have moral consequences. He doesn’t explicate or make detail what the consequences or the perils are.
It’s just obvious to him and Timothy and others that, yeah, it’s not good if you have a bunch of people running around in the church especially, loving money rather than God, boasting in themselves or the things of this world rather than God, being unforgiving rather than forgiving and being under the love of God, without self-control, all these other things. But it’s implied and not explicit. I want to make it explicit for a better, clearer application for us because these dangers affect all of us today, both from personal to public and everything in between.
Our families, our friends, our communities are impacted by these sins, especially here the sins of love or the misuse, perhaps I may find another use for this, another phrase to use here, misuse of love, the sinful use of love. They create, in general, division, hurt or anger, problems in the church when you love yourself so much, love money, love pleasures of this world. Now here, as I drill in a little more particular in the first point from the broad category of the world, loving of the things of this world to love being abused and misused, you’re loving oneself.
It’s a singular word, as I pointed out, fond of oneself, selfish, self-centered, narcissism, you have a number of words there for this idea of loving yourself, more important in your own eyes than other people, inordinate desires for or love for oneself, something like that is what he’s describing here in this word, which he uses philea with, by the way. One, I think, helpful definition here for us or description of this idea of self-love or selfishness is consistently prioritizing one’s own needs, desires, and time above others, often accompanied by a lack of empathy and accountability. Covers a lot of things, doesn’t it? I think that’s a nice way of describing this because, again, sometimes in my experience growing up as a believer, I hear the word selfishness used, and it was never clearly defined to me.
This helps make it a little more clear, I hope. And this, of course, includes relationships and everything else involved in these things. And then again, there’s also degrees of selfishness, to be sure.
But what we’re going to see especially, I think, and what makes it more clear is when we have the very strong examples for us. Now, self-centeredness today, I don’t think I need to make much of an argument for this. It’s very much widespread.
But brothers and sisters, I would say it’s also in the church. Paul thought it was. Remember, he slides here from verse 4 and says that they are lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, same sentence, having a form of godliness but denying its power, and from such turn away from.
It’s not like Timothy’s hobnobbing with unbelievers and pagans. It’s a pastor in the church. It’s a letter to a pastor of a church.
So these are sins in the church. Paul thinks a number of these are a problem, and they’re pretending to be Christians but having a form of godliness outwardly that looks good but deny its power. They don’t really believe in the gospel.
It’s just a game to them or something like that’s going on. We know lots of jokes, of course, about self-centeredness, looking in the mirror all day at yourself, those kind of stories, and that was the Greek story of him looking reflection in the pool, narcissism, where we get the word from. But it’s more common in our individualistic society maybe than during the time of Rome, I’m not sure, because they certainly taught community.
The Greeks and the Romans seriously took the family and community in a slightly different way than we do. They really much emphasized it. They didn’t have the massive propaganda machine we call the media or entertainment or advertisement and the like that really pushed, what about you and your desires and what you want, etc.? Ads, books, music, teachers and teachings and politicians present things for selfish gain.
What can I get out of them or what can I give you? It’s all about you. Our laws and rhetoric reinforce this selfishness, even to the highest courts and the Supreme Courts of the land where some of the rulings mention these things, mystery of self-will and self-determination. We can even get our own key chains with our names on it, which isn’t wrong necessarily, but it’s very fascinating, right? Didn’t have that growing up and it’s very easy to do that nowadays.
One study, I ran across these in the last few years, quite interesting, more and more studies, they’re building up and reinforcing each other. That’s the best way to do these social studies, of course. One study concluded, quote, we show that individuals with dark triad traits, this is what they’ve been finding more and more of, the dark triad traits, Machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy, more frequently signals virtuous victimhood.
Controlling for demographics and socioeconomic variables, they are commonly associated with victimization in Western societies. People running around, I’m a victim to all these things that clearly are not, or just in a vague sense, tend to be very narcissistic. I want the attention.
It’s about me. Again, another study from 2023, more recent, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity, grandiose visions of grandeur and dreams of yourself was found to be statistically significant related to greater involvement in feminist activities and feminist activities. Unexpectedly, gender did not moderate this relationship.
It wasn’t just more women than men who, in being active as a feminist, were more narcissistic. Both of them. That’s what they’re saying.
Also, higher pathological narcissism was related to stronger self-identification as a feminist. Not like I was looking for these studies. I found them providentially because I keep an eye on news cycles and things like that and studies, and they came up.
I was like, wow. The peer review, again, they’re building up on prior studies. I have other ones.
I would dare say it’s in the church. We know there’s feminism in the church. It’s a struggle we have to be aware of these things.
The fruits of selfishness are manifold because it’s such a deep ingrained problem for some people that whatever they do reflects, to some degree, selfishness. It spawns other sins. It can be the root of many other sins.
And I have, I think, some of these sins in here reflect selfishness, it seems to me. Being a traitor, for example. Why would you want to betray your family or your nation or your community or your church unless you thought it was all about you somehow? You got a better deal in another kind of relationship where you didn’t like all the extra burden it took to take care of your family, your kids.
That’s just too much work. I’d rather what? Divorce them because, hey, if things aren’t going your way, we got laws that can make things easier for you. Look at the way I’m speaking.
For you. It’s all about you. We live and breathe this stuff as Christians.
It’s in our world and society around us. I’m not saying you’re all doing it, but it’s there. We just grew up this way talking this way.
So being a traitor, which is in this list, by the way, right? I think fits rather well with that. The other word here in verse 3, if you have the KJV, you’ll see the translation of verse 3 is without natural affection or in the NKJV, unloving. I like the KJV here, if only because it expresses more clearly.
You can say unloving like, you know, typical English words. You can have all kinds of ways of describing or synonyms. But we miss, I think, the heart of it because it emphasizes the natural relationship that you have with one another as a family, as close kin and the like, and as a community.
And, of course, it spreads out to a nation that’s just there, even though it’s not exercised by your will as such. It’s not like, oh, I chose you as my father. I chose you as my nation.
Just what you have by nature. It’s where God put you in Providence. And, therefore, often, even with unbelievers, they have a natural love or affinity for things that are American or from Colorado or from your community and people, ways of thinking and doing, right? That’s natural affections.
This is the opposite, asturgy, without natural affection. And, again, there are degrees of this. But hating your family and despising your family, your family despising their own, like killing your babies, you say, that’s hateful.
Yes, but it’s also a double sin, as it were. It’s going against what is built into their hearts. They know this is their child.
They should love and take care of them. But they harden their hearts against them and kill them anyways. Mothers know, no matter how big or small a baby is, how beautiful or not beautiful a baby is, it’s their baby and they, what, love them.
That’s that storgy. And, of course, on top of the storgy, you have preciousness and pleasantness, philea and agape, layers of describing the same kind of love from a different perspective. Proud and boastful will certainly fit under being selfish and self-centered.
How dare you say that to me? Who do you think you are? Now, there’s a time to do that, of course, and Paul does it in his own way when they attack his apostleship, for example. Who do you think you are? Christ is the one who appointed me as apostle, but he did it a little less aggressively that way, but he did it nevertheless clearly in Corinthians, for example. But here, often, it’s an obvious sign of self-absorption.
There’s another word for selfishness. That’s five or six that we have. Always arguing and never admitting your error, something going on there.
Surely you’ve made some mistakes sometime in your life, but going years and years and years, perhaps you run across that. Perhaps you struggle with it. I don’t know.
Unthankfulness would also fit or could be a fruit of selfishness, and again, these particular sins could have other reasons other than selfishness, but it seems these fit most closely to this sin and growing out of the same soil. Of course, unthankfulness can be more a heart attitude, but we have cultural ways of expressing thankfulness, and so children would grow up in ignorance and not always knowing the best way to give a thankfulness appearance, instruct them. This is not talking about that.
This is clearly talking about someone who doesn’t care, doesn’t want to give gratitude where gratitude is due, and again, often, that’s because of selfishness. Of course, they should have done that for me. Why should I thank them for it? What? That’s the attitude.
Surely you’ve seen that. People are supposed to take care of them and serve them. No.
A thousand times, no, or as we say, they are entitled. Talk about the entitled generation many moons ago and many years ago, I think, in politics and the like. That’s that idea.
Now, some particular dangers of selfishness, of self-centeredness, as the world centers around me, the universe is just an extension of my will or something like that. I mentioned being traitors. Of course, that’s obvious.
That breaks relationships, makes things worse and hard in the family, in the community, in the church. That’s not good. That’s a danger.
That’s a peril. Without natural affection, a storgie, that, again, creates more friction and it can turn into not doing your duty, and so you end up harming your kids, harming your grandparents or your parents because you’re not going to take care of them in their old age because you just don’t care. More about you than taking care of other people, so you don’t do your responsibilities.
That makes clear, obvious social impacts and dangers for society, doesn’t it? Of course, schisms in the church because of selfish insistence upon minor issues. We’ve read, of course, that in 2 Timothy here in the prior chapter. And tensions and hurt feelings grow because people are self-absorbed.
Another example of danger affecting, in this case, not just your family, you, local community, the church that you’re in, an entire nation. We are living in this day and age. I think it was the 80s that they called the me generation, right? They were writing about that in the politics and the letters.
I can get away with it because I was a teenager then, so it wasn’t really me. Right, because teenagers aren’t selfish. But here we are today.
Childlessness. Of course, I don’t mean because of circumstances, because of sickness or whatever the case is, but purposely not wanting to have kids, ever. Because you’d rather, you say, I’d rather have a comfortable lifestyle.
It is so widespread, even Time magazine couldn’t hide from it. And their picture they have, I think it was 2018. This is one of many articles written about this topic.
Two couple, this couple laying out on the beach, just enjoying the childless life. The title was, the childless, the child free life, when having it all means not having children. The title tells you very clearly, and we are, as you know, in the midst of a sansdemic, not having enough kids.
Because it takes younger people to get certain jobs done in society than older people. That’s all there is to it. They have to train them and fill the positions.
They can’t fill the positions, not enough people now. Things are going to start contracting in my generation, in my lifetime. Because they don’t want to have kids.
They don’t ever want to have kids, more and more. Of course, we should examine ourselves, brothers and sisters, to see if we are being selfish. It may not be excessive.
Again, I don’t think we’re running around in these examples I use, and our lives in particular. But it may be there. And the best way, of course, to fight that is to learn to serve one another. First, in your family, of course, and those close to you, like your neighbors and your co-workers and the like, and your church.
Dangers of Loving Money
The second point, dangers of loving money. So this is more particular, dangers of loving money.
Lovers of money. That is, it’s a single word again, with the word phileia in it. Wanting to be rich, coveting.
So clearly it doesn’t mean it in the best sense of, I’d like to have some money so I can use it for other things. But I just love the money. And this is really great stuff.
I’ve got to get more money. The danger for the rich and poor alike, of course, when pining, that’s the idea here, both in selfishness, and the next point, loving or lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God. Pining is a very good example of that, for wealth and money.
Can’t get any sleep, always thinking about it, restless until you get more and more money. You think it’s going to fix all your problems. Now, you can get a job for money, or you can get a job to get money for your family.
Those are two different things, right? What’s the purpose in getting the money? This is not Paul arguing, as you can see, perhaps some people who’s a monk or something, look, Paul says I shouldn’t love money, I shouldn’t have money, I should just be dirt poor or something. No, Paul talks about tithes and other things. This is clearly him using the word in the sense of excessive desire for the thing itself, as opposed to what I can get out of it.
We all want to use money for good things, for the church, for one another. It’s how God designed it in his providence. And so this is inordinate desire, excessive desire for these things and for the wrong purpose, of course.
Particular dangers we have in here is Proverbs 28.20. In Proverbs 28.20, we read, a faithful man will abound with blessings, but he who hastens to be rich will not go unpunished. It’s just about the money. I got to get more money.
I got to make more money. Another 10 hours this week, another 30 hours this week, whatever the case may be. It’s a warning here that something will happen.
You will not go unpunished, whatever that may look like, if you are obsessed with pining for and cannot stop and keep going after wealth and money and all that it represents. Something bad will happen, and something bad is already happening often. And that’s another way of looking at the examples of danger, the concrete perils of these sins.
Pining after yourself, pining after money will affect the relationship. You put more time and effort. You have less time with your family, less time with the church.
You may be skipping church because you got to make better investments online. You tell yourself, it’s for my family. God’s like, well, sure, you can do that six days out of the week.
This is for me. That’s one good thing about the Lord’s day. Helps us put the right priorities on things.
Then, of course, one of the practical dangers of loving money rather than loving God is you become an easy mark, as they say. You’re an easy target for scams because you’re like, oh, this one more thing I can put money into or this investment. This guy’s promising a fast turnaround.
You put down your guard. You don’t pay attention. Those are good signs that something’s wrong here because it’s okay to invest, obviously, but you’re so quick to do it.
It’s driving you so hard that you miss the obvious red flags and you get scammed with, what, quick, rich schemes. And we know of people, and I know of people that they were lied to about an investment, and the guy ran off with their money. They lost it all.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars. They threw it all, as we say, in one basket because they were told. We know why they were told, because they fell for it, because their lusts were already there ahead of time.
That’s the only reason why the bait works. Or ignorance, of course. Sometimes you just simply ignore it.
And one other practical effect of not only this, of course, but the other sin we’re going to talk about lastly, love of pleasures, is lack of sleep. It affects your health. You just got to make more money.
Sometimes you can work too much. I mentioned that as well. It’s not just you’re lazy, you don’t work enough.
You can work too much. You got to spend time with your family, with the church, you got to take care of your health, you got to sleep. And so you can harm yourself with these kind of lusts.
The one way to fight the lusts for money, give to the poor. Give to those in need around you and the church. Make the money for them.
Not just about you. Pray the course of spirit to bring conviction of your hearts and to examine yourself if you are tempted in this regard or if you’re maybe not quite aware of it. Look at the signs here and that we not be too comfortable with greed because our society normalizes greed and our advertisement and our expectations and our teaching.
Dangers of Loving Pleasure
The third point, the dangers of loving pleasure. So this is the third category under loving the world. The dangers of loving pleasure.
And this is, of course, a pretty broad category. Obviously, money would fit under this category. But Paul thought it important enough to use the word perhaps to highlight I’m talking about all kinds of things going on here, not just money or even yourself.
It could be anything in this world. Anything that’s perceived to be the center of your happiness. We think from that perspective then we think of this world that will bring us again and again everything that we have, not things that are nice or helpful, but again excessive desire towards the pleasures of life because it’s not wrong to have money any more than it’s wrong to have a vacation now and then.
That’s pleasurable, we would say. That’s not what he means, clearly. But the successive desire or lusting after and taking pleasure, often we think of this example of the rich.
They have so much money, they just live a life of pleasure, we say. Are you going to be productive? Are you going to do something with your life and be helpful to other people or be involved in clubs or something like that? We recognize, even unbelievers, that something’s a little out of skelter here. It’s clearly a strong temptation just to love pleasure because you’ve got so much wealth.
That’s one of the dangers we have, having so much wealth. And again, the contrast here in the text is very clear. It’s not just love of pleasure as such is a sin.
It’s loving pleasure rather than lovers of God. Verse 4. Remember, read all the verses around and see what the sentence is and period is and the like. He’s describing, because he writes very long sentences, Paul does, in telling you, this is what I mean by lovers of pleasure.
Loving these things too much. Of course, there’s an immediacy to a lot of this often. Children reflect their love of pleasure in an immediacy of wanting something here and now.
I’ve got to have it now or I’m going to be very unhappy. Adults can hide that excessive love of pleasure because we can be a little more patient. And wanting the things we want.
But if we don’t get them eventually enough, in a few months, weeks, hours, we will be quite cranky. That’s one evidence. If our lusts are not fulfilled, our time and energy and money will therefore be, as in the other two cases, excessively thrown into the lots of pleasure.
Vacations all the time, never working, never being useful and productive. Again, when I say working, I don’t mean necessarily making money. Just being useful in God’s kingdom or your community or your job or your family.
And of course, in a family, you often don’t get paid. You just do a lot of work. And so these times, energies, and monies are excessively used towards pleasurable things.
That is, pleasurable things out of proportion of their worth and of the time of everything else in life as well. It’s another way of looking at what Paul is describing here. And I think an excellent example of this was the other night, daughter and I, let’s watch something together.
Okay, would you like to watch? Oh, what’s this show? Hoarders. I’ve never seen that. My daughter’s like, I’ve never seen Hoarders.
Let’s go check it out. Okay, I’ve been to a Hoarders house. I don’t really want to see it again.
And we watched it. And this guy, Bob was his name. Sorry, Bob, both Bobs.
It’s different, Bob. Beautiful house, Victorian era, some late 1800s, two or three story, you know, the classic. Open that door.
It’s a trash pit. Hiding beautiful dolls and paintings. He was an artist.
Stuff worth money, estimate up to $3 million worth of furniture and antiques lost in a pile of trash, feet deep. What was fascinating was, not that it happened, you could look at that, obviously he’s selfish or, you know, loving pleasure or something. He said it with his own mouth, I like or love to collect things.
Yeah, you could say that again. That’s obviously excessive. There’s something wrong with this man.
I don’t mean in the sense he’s not morally culpable. He is morally culpable. He’d rather just live in a pit of filth because he loves the pleasures of this world, the pleasures of, you know, we can’t comprehend it, but we have our own pleasures that we like other than other people like.
We know this. And he likes to collect dolls and likes to collect paintings and whatnot. So the harm of his property, you’re supposed to take care of your property.
It’s under the Eighth Commandment. Of his neighbors, it devalues their property around him having this trashy house, et cetera, et cetera. All the bad consequences that flow down from the effects of loving pleasures rather than life.
Easy access to debt is another problem in America that can lead to this, that gives those who are desiring of pleasures to run their life by pleasure only, they can go into debt and get even more pleasure, at least in their minds, which is a danger. And that leads us to the practical effects then, loss of money, income, time, and talent, for that matter. He’s wasting his talents.
Did it for decades now, was he almost in his 90s? All thrown away and wasted. Proverbs 21, 17. He who loves pleasure will be a poor man.
And he who loves wine and oil will not be rich. So there you go again. We sometimes use the word love, I want to make this clear again, in different ways.
Obviously, excessive, inordinates, over, above, because you can say, I love wine. And I’m not going to say, oh no, what is your problem? Or, you know, I love to eat or something. What you’re saying is, I really like it and I enjoy it, but I can still control myself.
I understand that. It’s just how we speak. He means it in the worst sinful way.
Lusting for more extreme pleasures. One of the interesting things of sin is it’s never satisfied. It wants more and more and more.
It’s among us, but denying its power. We see it, what we say is, talk all you want, but your practice is so that you really don’t love God and you’re not loving Him, but you rather love the world. And so Paul slides from his list to the pressing matter here in verse five and six of these Christians who are in danger and putting others in danger by their sinful actions.
These are, in other words, describe a lifestyle, this list of sins, of intentionally persisting and pursuing these transgressions of God’s law.
Security in Loving God
Contrary to a humble believer who may practice these things in the sense of they’ve done it, but they’re fighting it. Loving God begins with trusting in Jesus as our Savior, repenting of our sins.
So you may see a sin on this list and you say, that’s me. I’m not going to disagree with you. I’m going to tell you, repent and flee to Jesus.
That’s our only deliverer from this. And he gives us a spirit so that we can repent and may take a lifetime of repenting. I’m not going to say you’re going to wake up tomorrow and all these selfish sins are gone away with.
All the loves of the world are done away with. That’s an ongoing battle, brothers and sisters. That’s why Paul gives the list here to Timothy.
And we reread of it elsewhere in the New Testament. It’s there. It’s a fight that we have, but we have the spirit of God.
Loving God by the spirit’s power will grant us a humbled heart to face our sins and repent of them. A heart lifted to heaven to place our trust and reliance upon Christ. And it will renew our trust and love in him by using the means of grace, the prayer and his word, both read and preached that we may serve him and love him when the world will not.
May the Lord grant you and guard your soul from the dangers of selfishness, of love of money and of love of pleasures and the evils of our day. Let us pray. Father God almighty, may your spirit bring conviction where conviction is needed and comfort where comfort is needed.
And the strength, of course, in all these things by your spirit to resist, Lord, these abuses and misuse of love towards the things of this world. Help us, we pray God, to be more like Jesus and to love one another and above all to be lovers of God we pray. Amen.
Let us arise and let us sing.