If anyone teaches otherwise and does not consent to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which accords with godliness,

he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes and arguments over words, from which come envy, strife, reviling, evil suspicions,

useless wranglings of men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain. From such withdraw yourself.

For nearly seventy years now, a false teaching has colonised large sections of Christianity. This false teaching has been wildly successful, building megachurches of several thousand, building media empires operating global cable TV channels, and huge followings.

What is the error that these people teach? Some version of the following: God’s children are kings’s kids entitled to material wealth. Jesus came to die to free us from the sin of poverty. Poverty is the prison operated by Satan who came to steal and destroy our birthrights; humans need only to actualise a reality of prosperity and health through the spoken word of faith, and God will be allowed to bring about blessings previously held back by our negative thought and speech.

Christians can get back their inheritance if they a) give seed offering of money to the church, b) if they use faith and the spoken word to confess their wealth, to demand it, and to thereby force God to give them wealth. It’s known as the Prosperity Gospel, which is really a misnomer, because it is not good news and it doesn’t bring Prosperity, except to the charlatans teaching it.

If there was one place where the Prosperity gospel is particularly wretched, it is in countries already suffering from extraordinary levels of unemployment and economic stagnation. This is a “cure” that accelerates the disease. People suffering in dire poverty through a combination of misunderstanding the modern economy, a lack of marketable skills, laziness, governmental destruction of opportunity, or other providential circumstances are led to believe that poverty can be cured by giving what little money they have to the slick preacher up-front. A ‘seed-offering’ will come back hundredfold.

After all, look at the car that Apostle Shazam is driving: it’s working for him, right?

A false teaching like this distorts so many things: what Christians should think about wealth, how the world thinks about the church, the reputation of God’s people, people’s concept of faith. The world looks at these prophets of profit, and laughs. They shake their head that anyone could be deceived by them. Scripture has something to say about this.

This book has taught us how the church is to be properly ordered, and now it winds down by telling us how a well ordered church relates to the world, and to wealth.

First Timothy 6 is a concise study of how the church relates to wealth. How we earn it (vv1-2), how we should view it (6-10), how those who have much of it should act and think (v 17-19). And importantly, how the church and pastors should approach it.

There is not a hard and fast barrier between working in the world and working for the Lord, but there is a distinction. Pastors are not entrepreneurs trying to make a monetary profit. Paul in fact wants Timothy to flee from greediness in verse 11, and have a blameless ministry.

By contrast, there are some in the church, posing as teachers who are in it for the money. According to verse 5, they suppose that godliness is a means of gain. They want to use and exploit the things of faith purely for material gain. That makes them mercenaries: people who don’t care about the ethics of what they do, they will do anything for money.

This is nothing new. The church at Ephesus, where Timothy was pastoring, had enough false doctrines floating around. Eight times in this epistle the word doctrine comes up, and Paul treats doctrine as the key thing that Timothy must guard. And he wants Timothy, and Timothy’s church members to identify these false teachers who distort the Bible’s teaching on money and wealth. He wants Timothy to identify and separate from the prophets of profit.

That remains timely and relevant for us today, especially in our context. Now we could simply do a list of names. But the problem with that approach is that there’ll always be new names, and new false teachers. Instead, Scripture is going to give us a test for false teachers to be applied to anyone. Then, Paul will switch on his apostolic X-Ray and tell you what is inside the hearts and minds of these false teachers. Thirdly, he will tell you the results of these men’s ministry. So, three ways to identify them: a test, the truth about them, and their track record.

I. The Test For False Teachers

If anyone teaches otherwise and does not consent to wholesome words, even the words of our Lord Jesus Christ, and to the doctrine which accords with godliness,

Paul firstly gives us a test to check if someone is a false teacher. You can see that with the word “if”. This is a conditional statement. Look for the following outward marks.

By the way, that’s one of the assuring things that God keeps saying in the Word. False teachers on the inside always reveal themselves on the outside. As Jesus put it

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves.

You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles?

Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit.

A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit.”
(Matthew 7:15–18)

We don’t have to worry that we will be tricked our whole lives by a spy within the fold, a secret apostate who perfectly fakes the Christian life on the outside. No, Paul, Peter, Jude, James, John, all the apostles with the Lord Jesus say, “False teachers can be identified by their outward marks.

So what are those marks? Here Paul gives us two: what he does and what he does not do; what he declares, and what he denies.

What he does is “teach otherwise”. He teaches deviant doctrine. He shoots doctrinal arrows that don’t hit the target, but go skew and hit people in the crowd.

You look back on 1 Timothy and the man has a totally different view on authority and submission, he has his own teaching about elders and widows, he creates a new standard for pastors and church leaders not found in 1 Timothy, he has completely different ideas about women and men in corporate worship, his whole idea of the church is different to anything Paul or the apostles have taught here or elsewhere. Remember, this is how Paul began the book in 1:3?

As I urged you when I went into Macedonia—remain in Ephesus that you may charge some that they teach no other doctrine, (1 Timothy 1:3)

The man sets up a teaching which cannot be traced back to any New Testament apostle’s teaching. It is novel. And as the saying goes, what is new is seldom true, and what is true is seldom new.

Note some of the prosperity teachers out there have outrightly denied fundamentals of the faith.

And then we see negatively, he does not consent, which means follow carefully, be loyal to, embrace the healthy, wholesome, life-giving words of truth: both the very words and doctrine of Jesus Christ, or truth from Scripture that promotes godly reverence and love for God. He denies the truths of 3:16.

The truth always produces loyalty to Christ and a life of God-fearing holiness. “faith of God’s elect and the acknowledgment of the truth which accords with godliness” (Titus 1:1)

The false teacher is easily marked because he is not in submission to the whole Word of God. He is not a servant of the Word, constrained by the Word, under its authority, bound to teach only what it says. You can spot him because he is a maverick, a law unto himself, a man who boasts in his lack of submission to the text of Scripture, to what thoughtful teachers in the church have taught, to any kind of authority: God’s authority, the Word’s authority, the secondary authority of the doctrinal tradition of gospel-teaching churches.

With that lack of submission always comes a lack of separation. Separate, holy living comes from submitting to God’s Word. When you aren’t submitted, you do what you want.

Blessed is the man Who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, Nor stands in the path of sinners, Nor sits in the seat of the scornful;

But his delight is in the law of the LORD, And in His law he meditates day and night.
(Psalm 1:1–2)

Now it is important to distinguish between a brother in error versus a career false teacher. Fellow Christians are those who have embraced the fundamentals of the faith, the essentials: salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, the deity and humanity of Christ, the Trinity, the inspiration of Scripture, Christ’s sinless life, substitutionary death and bodily resurrection, eternal judgement. Those are the gospel essentials. Now after those essentials, you have important doctrines. If someone believes the essentials, but is in error on these, he is still a Christian, but a brother who is in error. That will limit our partnership. He is a brother, though not an ally in every battle.

Now Paul is not dealing with brothers who are in error on the doctrines of baptism, or the Lord’s Supper, or church government, or church worship. He is talking about people who have truly denied the faith altogether. We call these people apostates: unbelievers masquerading as teachers of the church.

But the first way to know that you are dealing with them is that they teach doctrine that deviates from historical Christian orthodoxy – the Creeds, the Confessions.

Now, once we have identified the outward marks, Paul is going to describe the inward condition. We need to know that this is no slip of the tongue, no absent-minded mistake. Someone who is habitually like this is a certain way on the inside, and Paul is about to describe it for us.

II. The Truth About False Teachers

he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes and arguments over words

Now Paul gives us several descriptions of the mind and heart of the false teacher. He is going to take the scalpel and dissect this frog and show you the gory innards. He wants you to recoil. The Bible wants you to breathe in the foul stench and be repelled.

Here it is. Top of the list: he is proud. This is a word that actually means someone so conceited that he has become lost in a haze; he has begun to believe his flatterers and blinded by the glow of his own ego. Like ancient Narcissus, he has fallen in love with his own image. And it’s in the perfect tense, meaning this is complete, it has been done. This is not momentary pride, but a state of being.

Of the six things the Lord hates according to Proverbs 6:16, pride is at the very top of the list. Pride is what brought about the fall of Satan. It is the very opposite of Christian character, and it prevents true usefulness by the Holy Spirit. A proud man is full of himself, so there is no room for the Holy Spirit to fill and control him. Look at the swagger and the attitude of many of these prosperity gospel teachers. Five minutes of watching them and you’ll think this was a prize-fighter before his match, or a Hollywood celeb giving an acceptance speech, or a comedian strutting his stuff.

With that conceited self-deception comes his total ignorance. Knowing nothing. Obviously he knows some things. He knows facts. He has some knowledge or else no one would listen to him. But because he is so deep in error, what it amounts to is zero truth. His pride inflates his self-confidence, but he has no basis for it:

And if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. (1 Corinthians 8:2)

His knowledge is like a jumble of incorrect maths equations that all add up to the wrong answer. Similar to what Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:7:

ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.

But he is not a harmless ignoramus. The next description tells us that he is obsessed with disputes and arguments over words.

Obsessed is a powerful word which means diseased. He has a sick, perverse obsession and fascination with only those points of doctrine that under dispute, controversial. He is magnetically drawn to whatever is doubtful and produces arguments. Like a bull drawn to the red cloak of the matador, he rushes to questions that he knows Christians don’t agree on or fight over.

The false teacher likes the sight of blood; it stirs him up and gets his pulse going. Regular, sound doctrine seems to him boring and pedestrian; he wants the questions no one has been able to answer, the disputes that the greatest minds in church history have not been able to solve.

Nothing wrong with chewing on some tough theology, wrestling with big and tough questions. That’s not the problem. The false teacher wants to be controversial; he wants the edginess and the glamour of being in the ring, always fighting. In fact, in today’s media world, it is being edgy, controversial, shocking, outrageous that gets you likes and views.

One of the things he does is fight over words. Again, nothing wrong with studying the meaning of words, if your goal is clarity. But the false teacher twists words, turns them inside-out, backwards and upside down until he has made texts say the opposite of what they seem to say. And sometimes it looks very deft, that the man has made a whole argument swing upon his new definition of one word in the text. But here is a rule of thumb: if someone’s new definition of a word contradicts the rest of Scripture, then whatever he says about that word is false.

Prosperity gospel teachers like to redefine important words like faith. Faith means something like, “create your own personal reality by acting and speaking as if it is the case”. They redefine “blessing” to mean “financial and material prosperity that will make you the envy of the world”. They redefine salvation to mean “being saved from poverty and everything Satan stole from you and being restored to your birthright as a king’s kid.

Proud, knowing nothing, sick obsession with controversy and twisted words. But Paul has another description of them at the end of verse 5:

men of corrupt minds and destitute of the truth, who suppose that godliness is a means of gain

The false teacher has a dirty mind. His thoughts and his thinking is polluted with all sorts of lusts: lusts of the flesh, lusts of the eyes, immorality, covetousness. It’s just a hive of worldly ambitions, sensual desires, unredeemed, sinful cravings.

He is without the truth, the truth has not penetrated. As someone put it, depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.

In their corrupt minds, they think that godliness, which is another way of speaking about the whole Christian faith: the Christian life, the Christian church, Christian worship, the Christian religion as a whole; is a means, an instrument for financial gain. They view the church as a tool to get rich.

Now of course, this was around in Paul’s day. There were false teachers for hire, who preyed on people’s fears, and ignorance, and charity and gullibility.

whose mouths must be stopped, who subvert whole households, teaching things which they ought not, for the sake of dishonest gain. (Titus 1:11)

For neither at any time did we use flattering words, as you know, nor a cloak for covetousness—God is witness. (1 Thessalonians 2:5)

By covetousness they will exploit you with deceptive words; for a long time their judgment has not been idle, and their destruction does not slumber. (2 Peter 2:3)

Woe to them! For they have gone in the way of Cain, have run greedily in the error of Balaam for profit, and perished in the rebellion of Korah. (Jude 11)

Church history is filled with people who exploited God’s people in this way: collection of indulgences, preachers promising financial freedom and blessing if people gave, or threatening poverty if they did not. And today we have the Prosperity Gospel which grew out a 19^th century cult known as New Thought, which was also behind the cult of Christian Science.

It is no small thing to confuse means with ends. Money is a means to an end. Churches, like any other place, need money to achieve their ends. But money is a tool, a means. When money becomes the goal, when the means become the end, then idolatry is taking place. The Creator is being replaced with the creature. We are loving the path more than the destination, the tool more than the finished work.

We live in a world where for many people, the profit motive is the only way they explain everything. That’s the only grid they have: what’s in it for you? What kind of stuff or material possessions would float your boat? How much money do you want? How much are you after?

If there is one place in the world where we should say, money is not the end goal, money is not what we are pursuing, it is the church. The church proclaims a God who is Himself our great reward, our treasure, our gold and silver. If in the very place where we proclaim that God is the gospel, God Himself is the good news, we now turn around and make money the great aim and focus, we are guilty of a terrible sin.

So Paul has shown us the test we can use, and revealed the truth of what is going on inside. But he wants to do one more thing. He wants us to know what the teaching of a false teacher does. If you bring a rhino into a porcelain shop, you will very soon know that there was a rhino in that porcelain shop. If there is a false teacher teaching false doctrine, you will very soon know it.

III. The Track Record

from which come envy, strife, reviling, evil suspicions, useless wranglings

From these proud, ignorant people who love controversy and disputing over words come five things, which more or less overlap with each other.

• Envy. Churches that allow false teaching will soon find jealousy, competition, and a kind of rivalry breaking out, where carnal people compete to be the most spiritual, or the wealthiest, or the most prominent. Once our eyes are no longer on the glory of God, but have descended to earthly rewards, you can expect the same rat-race, dog-eat-dog, keeping up with the Joneses mentality that you see in the world, now in the church.
• Strife. With that jealousy naturally comes the verbal and emotional conflict of people competing for the limelight, for attention, for notoriety.
• Reviling. This means abusive words falsely spoken, damaging other’s reputations.
• Evil suspicions. All kinds of conjecture, gossip, rumours about others, conclusions without evidence.
• Useless wranglings. This is a constant argumentativeness.

Now, how would you like to live in that house? Jealousy, conflict, abusive speech, believing the worst of each other, and continual arguing. That’s the church where these false teachers teach their deviant doctrine.

The fruit of truth, and truth obeyed is always unity, oneness of mind. Sound doctrine brings love and the edifying of the body. The fruit of false teaching is endless and continual conflict. That’s why Paul keeps telling Timothy and Titus to steer the ship away from the icebergs of false teaching or even futile teaching:

nor give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which cause disputes rather than godly edification which is in faith. (1 Timothy 1:4)

But avoid foolish and ignorant disputes, knowing that they generate strife. (2 Timothy 2:23)

But avoid foolish disputes, genealogies, contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are unprofitable and useless. (Titus 3:9)

Proverbs warns us

By pride comes nothing but strife, But with the well-advised is wisdom.

You can’t have proud people teaching proud doctrine and expect humble listeners and the peace of humility. Pride brings strife. Self-centred, egotistic people bring problems.

Take people to the cross, show them the glory of God, and people are humbled, and love and unity is the result.

Look for the fruit. Does this ministry produce stable, healthy churches made up of godly leaders, maturing members, stable marriages, godly families, with believers learning to live in harmony with each other? Or has it become a circus of competing spiritual peacocks, trying to outdo each other, with sin festering and multiplying in the congregation, legalism and license co-existing, factions, cliques, people trying to curry favour with this leader or that one.

So, first, apply the test. Does he deviate from sound doctrine, deny the words of Christ and Christian doctrine? Then know he is proud and ignorant and contentious and warped in his thinking. That’s the truth. And this will be the track record: churches forever in flames: conflict, fighting, rivalries, competitions. Pride begets strife.

So Paul has a final command here: From such withdraw yourself.

Withdraw, depart, turn away from these people. Separate from them. Break all bonds of supposed fellowship, because it doesn’t exist anyways. Don’t collaborate in ministry, don’t partner.

Now I urge you, brethren, note those who cause divisions and offenses, contrary to the doctrine which you learned, and avoid them. (Romans 16:17)

having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away! (2 Timothy 3:5)

What about warning them? Yes, if you are in their circle of influence, and they are teachable enough to hear you. But if not, don’t waste your time: withdraw from them.

I said it during this series, and will say it again. When people sit under ungodly leaders, they have themselves to blame. Why? Because Scripture tells us what those leaders are to be. So when poor South Africans have their money fleeced from them by the snake-oil salesmen of the prosperity gospel, they have themselves to blame. Why? Because these verses have been in the Bible for nearly 2000 years: false teachers who teach that godliness is a means of gain. From such, turn away.