Our Old Testament reading comes from Jeremiah chapter 32, 36 through 41. And it reads, Now therefore, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning this city of which you say, it is given into the hand of the king of Babylon by sword, by famine, and by pestilence. Behold, I will gather them from all the countries to which I drove them in. my anger and my wrath and in great indignation. I will bring them back to this place and I will make them dwell in safety. And they shall be my people and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way that they may fear me forever for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will make them an everlasting covenant and I will not turn away from doing good to them. I will put the fear of me in their hearts that they may not turn from me. I will rejoice in doing them good, and I will plant them in this land in faithfulness and with all my heart and all my soul. That ends our reading in Jeremiah. Our Psalter reading comes from Psalm 107 and is printed in the bulletin. O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. Some were fools through their sinful ways and because of their iniquities suffered affliction. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. He sent out his word to heal them and deliver them from their destruction. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man. Let them offer sacrifices of thanksgiving and tell of his deeds in songs of joy. Our epistle reading comes from 1 Timothy, chapter 1, verses 3 through 11. And it reads, As I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine, nor to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies which promote speculations rather than the stewardship from God that is by faith. The aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. Certain persons, by swerving from these, have wandered away into vain discussions desiring to be teachers of the law without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. Now, we know that the law is good if one uses it lawfully. Understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the ungodly and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine. in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. That ends our reading in Timothy. Our gospel reading comes from John, chapter 6. which is right here, verses 66 through 71. And it reads, after this, many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him. So Jesus said to the 12, do you want to go away as well? Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God. Jesus answered them, did I not choose you, the 12, and yet one of you is a devil? He spoke of Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, for he, one of the 12, was going to betray him. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. we live in a mixing bowl of religious beliefs and teaching. Some of them have been around for a long time, like Hinduism, Islam, Native American religious beliefs, Judaism, and Christianity. Others are newer, maybe just the last few decades, and less well-known, like the religious belief of Jim, who has created a new religion with a group of business executives in the Seattle area. They believe God loves us all, God just loves us, and embraces us no matter what sin we have in our lives. We simply need to live in tune with him through meditation and mutual encouragement. Oddly enough, people who wish to set themselves off from God have religious beliefs. They are religious about humanity saving itself from destruction. So even if someone would not claim to believe in a God, they can still be very religious in their beliefs. Now, all of this is stirred together in our culture like a big stew with pieces of beef, carrots, peas, corn, and potatoes floating around in thick tomato base. We live in a big pot of religious belief and teaching. And the key word today is diversity. Globalism advocates diversity of faith and religious practice, among other things. It's believed that religious belief is a natural human enterprise. Religion is nothing more than cultural expressions of people. And that is very different than saying cultures have the bonds of religious commitments within them. Diversity claims that all religious faith and practice is equal, whether it is Islam's Ramadan fast, the Jewish Rosh Hashanah, or the Christians' Lord's Supper. They're all essentially the same. What we have here, you see, is this idea of religious diversity. And we're thick in the middle of it. But it's not particularly new. The ancient Roman Empire was religiously diverse. There were many temples and many gods. Temples of Hera, Tyche, Cybele, Apollo, Aphrodite, Athena, and Jewish synagogues. And that was just in Corinth. And Romans were suspicious of new religions. because they were afraid they might be subversive. But even though they were suspicious, they tolerated a whole spate of different religious groups, as long as they affirmed the others and offered sacrifices to the emperor. In the midst of this diversity, the church was called to preach and teach the gospel in the Roman Empire, that God sent his son, Jesus Christ, into the world to save sinners. And the church is still called by God to do this today within the religious diversity of the culture we live in. But here's the rub. The world around us values diversity of faith. But here in the church, we must stop teaching inside the church that is contrary to the gospel. Paul tells Timothy to stop other teaching in the church where he was. And that's, we heard in our reading from Paul's letter to Timothy, the first letter. Verse 3 says, as I urged you when I was going to Macedonia, remain at Ephesus so that you may charge certain persons not to teach any different doctrine. More literally, Paul calls it heterodoxy, and you can see that in the bulletin, the title for the sermon. That word heterodoxy is not a word we use very much today in our language. It means other teaching. There was the teaching that was rooted in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that included morality and a Christian way of life. And I think sometimes we don't consider that when we talk about the gospel. The gospel isn't just about how Jesus Christ came to save us from our sins. That's the fundamental aspect of it. But the gospel includes teaching about morality and the Christian way of life. That's part of it. And so I have an example here that comes from another letter of Paul. Paul's letter to the Philippians, he instructed the church in Philippi to do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Now, if you just took that little bit of it, there are all kinds of people who are not Christians who would like that and affirm that and say, oh, that's a good moral principle. Taken by itself, this might sound like general moral advice that might come from the human resources service at a big company about how to get along with your coworkers. They could use this very easily. I should work there. I came up with that. I don't know if they use that or not, but I think that would be something that a human resource department might actually want to use. General human respect. Even though much of this general human respect that we long for in our companies gets drowned out with competition, competition for a better job position or protecting ourselves from malicious gossip by maybe throwing out a little gossip the other way or self-centeredness. On the job, it sounds good, nice moral ideals to follow, but if it's rooted in human nature, it doesn't get very far. If that little line from Paul is just rooted in our own human nature, well, there are many other things in our human nature that are going to crowd it out and overcome it. Paul roots his teaching in Jesus Christ, not in human nature. That's to say he roots it in the gospel. Thus, in his letter to the Philippians, he says it this way. He says, let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a slave. Now, this is a whole lot more than Jesus is your example. Paul's not simply saying, oh, Jesus is a good example of this moral principle I gave you, and so follow him. Paul says, have this mind or attitude among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus? Which is yours in Christ Jesus? He says that to the church. That right there takes this, what sounds like it might be a general moral principle, and roots it right down into the gospel. Christ gives something to those who are joined with him by faith. He gives them a different attitude. He gives them a different way to think about other people and about themselves. So you see, this is teaching that's rooted in the gospel. And I jumped out of Timothy to go over to Philippians for a moment. because I wanted you to see that the teaching of the New Testament isn't just general moral teaching. It's rooted in the gospel, just like talking about Jesus Christ dying for us to save us from our sins is obviously the gospel, and so is the teaching about how we should live. It's rooted in the gospel. Now, other teaching not rooted in the gospel is heterodoxy. It may be interesting. It may be accurate on its subject matter. But whatever the case, it takes the church away from the gospel and settles things on us or something else. So for example, a church in New Jersey offers this class on Sunday morning during their Christian education hour, which would be an official time for the church to teach. It offers this class, Health Care Headwinds, New Jersey's Stake in the ACA Fight. Now, is there anything wrong with educating people on the health care debate? No. But it's not what the church is called to teach. The church is called to teach what is based on the gospel of Jesus Christ. There are many other places to learn about the issues in health care. And I might say that there are probably a lot of other better places to learn about the issues of health care than the church trying to educate people on it. The church must get this straight. It has to get this straight. Otherwise, we'll wander away from the gospel towards those things that we consider more urgent. The church is called to teach the things of the gospel. Now, Paul does not define the heterodox teaching in the church in Ephesus. He doesn't break it down and give us all the details about this other teaching in the church in Ephesus. He names some of its subject matter. He calls it myths and endless genealogies. He actually uses some words that give us the understanding that it was exhausting. Interminable tediums promoting foolish speculations. There's been a lot of discussion about what this teaching was. You see, once you mention something like this, then people think, wow, I wonder what that was, and they start trying to investigate it. Well, at the time, Jews already had speculative treatments of the Old Testament. They had developed rather elaborate speculations about certain figures in the Old Testament like Enoch and Moses and others. Greek pagans were beginning to create lists of emanations of divine beings in order to explain creation and the origin of the human race. That was beginning to happen with some of the pagan groups. But there's good reason to believe that the teaching that had come into the church and that was rising up in the church in Ephesus was more of that Jewish kind. It was concerned with these genealogies and these speculations about Old Testament characters. But for what Paul says about these myths and genealogies, we know very little. We know very little about them. And you know what? That's the way it should be. We shouldn't know all the details and have all the intriguing facts about these teachings. Sometimes the church, in wanting to shut something down, inadvertently becomes fascinated with it and actually begins to teach what it's trying to stop. It becomes inadvertently a teacher of it. I saw this happen with the subject of the devil. When I was a boy, in our baptismal vows, we renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. That's standard Christian confession at the baptism. When I was younger, there were some in the church who taught about the devil and the devious operations, his devious operations, with the intent of educating people on the devil. That was their point. But it had a very dangerous effect. People became fascinated with the devil and with evil. And how contrary to the New Testament this is. In the Bible, the devil is talked about in relationship to the gospel and Christ defeating the power of the devil. And this is the reason we can stand firm in temptation and resist evil. The Bible does not go into any more detail than that about the devil. But you see, sometimes when we become overly interested and focused on something, Even in the Bible, we can highlight it, separate it, and it takes on an interest all of its own that's separate from the gospel. And that has happened with the subject of the devil in the Bible. This heterodox teaching, this other teaching in the church at Ephesus, did have something to do with the Old Testament law. And Paul corrects their teaching of the law in the last part of our reading this morning, verses 8 through 11. Apparently, the heterodox teachers were isolating the law from the gospel. And Paul focuses on the Ten Commandments. There's almost an exact correspondence between the last five sins that he lists and the second table of the Ten Commandments. Father and mother killers fits with the Fifth Commandment. Murderers fits with the Sixth Commandment. Fornicators in the practice of homosexuality with the Seventh Commandment. Slave traders, the Eighth Commandment. And liars and perjurers with the Ninth Commandment. And when we see this, and we go back to the first three general classifications that he gives in that list in verse 9, we see that they relate to the first table of the Ten Commandments. So Paul is setting out the Ten Commandments here and a list of sins that corresponds to it. Basically, it's a list of the kinds of sins that the Ten Commandments prohibits. And Paul doesn't reject the law. He doesn't say this law, these 10 commandments, the law of Moses, is to be cast out. He says it's good if it's used rightly. It needs to be used the right way. And it's used rightly when it's used with the gospel. The law of Moses does not exist for its own sake. And again, in the church, we can become so fascinated with the law that we separate it, we isolate it, we zero in on it, and we become all about learning all the law and trying to develop teaching that's all oriented around the law. But we can do that in separation from the gospel. The law is for lawbreakers, showing them their need for salvation. That's the purpose of the law. And this was true for Israel. God gave his law through Moses to Israel, but they transgressed it and came under God's judgment and were exiled to Babylon. But with God's judgment came his promise to redeem them and to make them a new people. And this is what we hear in our Old Testament lesson this morning from Jeremiah. Thus says the Lord, I will bring them back to this place, and I will make them dwell in safety. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. And I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever for their own good and the good of their children after them. I will rejoice in doing them good. So the law showed Israel's need for salvation, and God promised to be their Savior, and that's all right there back in the Old Testament. The law not separated from the promise of God's salvation. They needed a Savior, and God promised to be that Savior. And so even in the Old Testament, we read the law with the promise of God's salvation. Teaching in the church that is removed from the gospel is to be stopped, even if it's with something good, like the law. It has to be stopped when it's removed from the gospel. The reason it needs to be removed, the reason that heterodox teaching needs to be stopped is because it's not innocent. And that's a very common myth in our culture, that all this diversity that we talk about is all equal and benign and innocent. No, it's not. Now, it depends on what we're talking about with that diversity. If we're talking about diversity of languages, OK, fine. Languages can be good. I mean, they're good, and they have their different ways of expressing things, and that's fine. But when we're talking about diversity of religion, it's not all equal, and it's not innocent. And we need to understand that. It's not just diversity of belief. Paul says that the heterodox teaching in Ephesus arises from a wandering from the faith and from a wandering away from a good conscience. In verse 8, he says, certain persons, by swerving from these, and he's referring to what he just mentioned, namely a good conscience and a sincere faith, have wandered away into vain discussion. So in wandering away from a sincere faith and good conscience comes this vain discussion, this other teaching. Certain leaders in the church had left the gospel behind, and they were not making good moral decisions. This has happened over and over again in the church. As you hear this, what the word of God is saying, and you begin to think about the church today, you realize this is a perennial problem in the church. A popular leader picks up some message other than gospel, leader in the church, and he begins teaching it. And along with it come wrong moral decisions. Isn't this what has happened with the so-called prosperity doctrine that began to be popular in the church in the 1970s and 80s? And I can remember this. I lived in it. I heard that teaching. It was all around me. There were friends of mine that promoted it. I went off to a college where it was popular as well. And then we began to hear some of the news about some of these leaders falling into trouble. Not all of them, but some of them. Leaders wandered off from the gospel and began to teach that you could become healthy and wealthy if you had enough faith. And that's an important qualifier. If you have enough faith. Puts it back on you. Faith becomes a work. It's something you have to do. And you can always question yourself, do I have enough faith? Do I have enough faith? Is that why I don't have this health that I need, this prosperity that I want? So many of these leaders made morally wrong decisions. And if you're old enough to remember the news stories, they had affairs. They took up with prostitutes. They diverted funds from their ministries to pay for extravagant lifestyles. And when they were confronted on this, they lied. So you can see that their conscience had become corrupted. Heterodox teaching in the church has a faithless origin, the abandonment of the gospel. And that's its origin, and there are consequences. Paul says, heterotox teaching is destructive to the church. It's not innocent. It's destructive. We hear more about this later in the letter. If we read the entire letter, you'd hear this coming up again and again. But Paul says it produces quarreling and divisions. Verse 6, 4 through 6, says, there comes a craving for controversy and quarrels about words, envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth. And then Paul uses the imagery of a shipwreck for two of these false teachers. He says, they have made a shipwreck of their faith in anyone who follows their teaching. We'd say today a train wreck, a disaster. And I would add to this, it causes unbelief. Other teaching takes you away from the gospel. It causes unbelief. Heterodoxy makes the church unhealthy. The church that departs from the gospel of Jesus Christ and begins to allow other teaching in the name of diversity or equality is a sick church. It has a serious infection, and if it continues on its course away from the gospel, it will die. I'm not talking about the entire church, I'm talking about local churches, but if they continue in that course, they will die. Often, Christians assume the church is weak and sick if it is small or have members that come and go, that move away, new ones come in, and it has that kind of change going on, which would pretty well describe almost every church, big or small, in this country. There's all kinds of mobility in our culture. But if a church is small, it's often assumed that it's weak or it's sick. Well, not so. There are many reasons for why a church is small. The symptoms of a sick church are an unwillingness to forgive each other, gossiping about each other, refusing to help each other and serve one another, and a loss of interest in hearing the preaching of God's word. When you find that wholesale in a church, you've got a sick church. It doesn't matter how big it is, small or large. Life comes from God. Life from God comes from the gospel of Jesus Christ, not from other teaching. God has revealed his word, has spoken his word into history, and through that word comes the life, the eternal life that God gives to us, not from some other teaching. In our gospel lesson, we heard that many of those who were following Jesus turned back and no longer walked with him. They wandered away. So Jesus said to the 12, do you want to go away as well? And Simon Peter answered him, Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Indeed, as Jesus had just taught them in chapter 6, he's the bread of life. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. Other teaching in the church is unhealthy. I want to give you an example of this, because all this kind of instruction and teaching we get in the epistles can sometimes seem like it's so far away and irrelevant to us today, but it's not. This unhealthiness is what has happened in the Episcopal Church. It can happen to any church, but it right now is happening with the Episcopal Church. And from there, from the Episcopal Church in the larger Anglican communion. The Anglican Church tries to hold divergent beliefs together through a tradition called comprehensiveness. Unity in the church was based on the common liturgy that was used in worship. And it's a lovely, beautiful, very well-grounded liturgy. And I've often enjoyed worshiping in such churches because of that liturgy. This has allowed, unfortunately, this has allowed pastors to believe what they wanted to believe and teach what they wanted to teach as long as they said the same liturgy. So as long as they're using the same liturgy and saying what the liturgy says, confessing the creeds and all of that, then they can teach whatever they want. And there's been this allowance of a great theological diversity in the Anglican churches. That liturgy that they have contains the ecumenical creeds of the church, like the Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed. We'll say the Apostles' Creed in a minute. But as an Episcopalian chaplain told one man who was considering becoming a priest in the Episcopal Church, but he had trouble of conscience, he was offended by some of the affirmations of the creed. And this chaplain told him, said, this is no problem at all. Don't worry about that. Just speak the portions that don't offend you. So I don't know what portions offended him. I can guess, but he'd have blanks in his creed. He would go silent as he confessed it in their liturgy. Well, over time, the Episcopal Church has approved of a number of diverse teachings that move away from the apostolic teaching of the gospel. And one of these is the approval of the practice of homosexuality among the members in the church. It's even ordained those to the priesthood and bishops who are openly gay. This has had an enormous impact on that church, so much so that the New Yorker, of all things, called it a church asunder. Some bishops of dioceses in this country have refused to participate in general councils because they disagree. They say this is wrong. The Anglican bishops and churches in Africa have denounced what has happened in the United States church. Archbishop Ekinola of Nigeria has said, what is written of God is for all time, for all people. But when you take what is convenient for you and hold on to that, and that which is not convenient for you, you throw it away, then there's a problem. When the church allows teaching that is contrary to the gospel, then instead of proclaiming the grace of God that delivers us from our sin, we have to defend somehow in our church what God says should not be done. And currently, because of all this, there's great division in the Anglican Church. It can happen and has happened in press-trained churches, Methodist churches. It can happen anywhere. Teaching that is in accord with the gospel On the other hand, it's healthy for the church, healthy. Paul says, the aim of our charge is love that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith. The teaching of the gospel arises from faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. The teaching of that gospel arises from faith in that gospel. God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to save us from our sin. And Jesus did this by his birth, his ministry of teaching and healing, and ultimately by his death and resurrection. The essence of the gospel is the good news of what Jesus has done to save us from our sin. And his apostles were witnesses of these things and were commissioned by Jesus to go out into the world and preach and teach the gospel. And this is what the church is founded on throughout the centuries. It's founded on that. The teaching of the church, whether it's what we believe or what is morally right and morally wrong, what we say is morally right and morally wrong, our worship or how we are to engage the world and live in the world, is all to be based on the gospel. Right teaching in the church comes from faith in the gospel of Jesus Christ. So that's its origin. And it also has consequences. The consequences of teaching the gospel in the church is love. This is what Paul says, the aim of our charge is love. And the charge is Jesus Christ has charged his apostles and ministers to preach the gospel. And the aim of that or the consequences of that charge is love. As the gospel is taught, the church loves God more and more. We love him as our heavenly father. We love him as the one who created us and loved us first and did not abandon us because of our sin. We love God more than anything else. Our desire is for him. The church also loves each other more and more as it hears the gospel. As Paul wrote to the Colossians, putting on compassion and kindness, humility, patience, bearing with one another, and forgiving each other. In other words, the church where the gospel is being taught is healthy. And that doesn't mean it's immune to problems or won't have struggles. It means that it deals with them well, and it's not ripped apart by the problems that come along. I believe we've seen that here. We've seen a church where we have grown in love, learning to love each other. We come from truly a diverse background in many ways, many kinds of different backgrounds and ethnicity, language even. I don't know if you all know this, but there are some in the congregation where I send the sermon to them ahead of time. They already know. They still come. They already know it's going to be preached. They get it, and they translate it into their language so they can understand it better. We have a real diversity here. But we don't have a diversity of teaching. We don't have a heterodoxy of what is taught. It's one of the nice things about our name. We're Providence Orthodox Presbyterian Church. Orthodox is set off against heterodox. So here we are. And as we hear these things, we've grown in love. We've learned how to love each other. And didn't we? haven't we had to learn how to love each other with the gospel? We have. And we're doing it. And that's not because our nature happens to be more stellar than other people's nature. We've got all the sin and everything other people do. It's because the gospel is being taught and preached, and we're growing together towards that goal of love. Yes, churches and Christians can wander away from the gospel, but we need not be wracked with fear and suspicion about this. That could be a natural response. We start looking around at each other to check every little thing that's being said. Jesus Christ keeps faithful teaching in the church. He's the one that keeps it there. That's why Paul sent this letter to Timothy and the church in Ephesus. It didn't come out of Paul. It was motivated by Jesus Christ preserving faithful teaching in his church. And he does the same for us here. He has given us his word and his spirit to direct what is taught and to make us healthy. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, because without your grace we will wander away from your gospel, Mercifully grant that your Holy Spirit, with your word, may in all things direct and rule our hearts. Through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.