Welcome to the Thee Generation Podcast. I’m Bobby Bosler and I’m speaking to you today from Martinsville, Indiana. I and my team have trained and we are getting geared up to head down to our first meeting coming up here in just a couple days.

I’d appreciate your prayers for the journey. But you know, as we’ve begun training here this semester, we’ve also been studying through 1 Timothy together as a team. And as I’ve been studying in my personal time, there have been a couple things that I thought, you know, this is key not only for us, but I think this is going to be key for some of you all who are listening to the podcast.

So if you’re able, I want you just to listen along briefly. In 1 Timothy chapter 1 and verses 3 and following, the Apostle Paul is writing to his protege in the faith, Timothy.

And in verse 3, he says, As I besought thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine, neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies which minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in faith, so do. Now to briefly summarize what he’s saying there, is he’s saying, hey, listen, Timothy, I told you to stay there at Ephesus.

I have other things to attend to, and I want you to talk to some of these troublemakers in your church, and I want you to charge them, challenge them, order them, not to teach different kinds of doctrine. I want you to teach them what I told you to teach them, nothing else. He says, and he kind of drills into that a little bit more in verse four when he talks about the fables and genealogies.

These people were getting enamored by myths and bloodlines. What they were doing is they were taking a look at the Old Testament, best I can tell, and they were speculating about things that just plain were not written there. And he says the results of this is they minister questions rather than godly edifying.

What he’s saying is, listen, all these things do is bring controversy. They don’t help anybody in their Christian walk. Now, in verse 5, and I’m going somewhere with all of this, just follow along with me here.

He says, now the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart and of a good conscience and of faith unfeigned, from which some, having swerved, have turned aside unto vain jangling. Now, he says at the beginning of verse 5, he talks about the end of the commandment.

Now, a question you’ve got to ask yourself when you’re taking a look at a passage like this is you’ve got to ask yourself, okay, the commandment, what is that referring to? Well, I want you, if you look back up, he said in verse 3, as I sought thee to abide still at Ephesus, he said that thou mightest charge some that they teach no other doctrine.

That word for charge there is the same word as the word for commandment in verse 5. Now, I don’t want to get overly technical, but what he’s saying is this. Listen, I told you to order these people, to charge these people, to command these people that they knock off teaching this inaccurate garbage.

He says, the end of the commandment, my end, my goal, my aim in telling you to command these people things, these things is charity. Huh? What he’s saying basically is, listen, the reason why I told you to tell these people, to order these people to quit it is because what was at stake is their love.

And again, you may be thinking, what in the world are you talking about, Brother Bosler? Remember what he said the end of their controversy was. He says, listen, you’re speculating about these things.

You’re going beyond what’s written in the Bible. You’re trying to basically make up a scenario that the Bible doesn’t even talk about. And he makes a specific statement.

All they do is engender controversy. They don’t help anybody. He says, here’s what you’re doing.

You’re just arguing about stuff. You’re just arguing about stuff that isn’t really accomplishing the mission that God has given you. You’re not helping people in their walk with God.

And you know what? honestly, I see this kind of stuff all over the place. People want to argue their point.

They want to argue about this, that, or the other thing, but nobody wants to help anybody. And he’s saying, listen, I want not only you, my son in the faith, Timothy, but I want the people, even the problem people that you’re leading to have the heart of Christ, that love that we’ve talked about in previous podcasts that has the concern for others more than for themselves. That’s what’s at stake.

These people at the root are so self-focused, all they can see is their own point and their own reputations that they’re trying to elevate. I’m not going to get to that verse that talks about that, but he says these people are only concerned about themselves. They’re at hand, which is helping people.

In fact, when you look at, he says, the end of the commandment, my goal for these people, my reason for telling you to command these people to quit it is because I want them to exhibit charity, love, a deep-seated concern for the good of other people around them in their hearts. They’re not doing that. Now, maybe you listened to my podcast a couple months ago when I talked about essential love.

And maybe when you heard that, you thought, well, man, I don’t seem to really care about other people. I really seem every time I turn around to be more concerned about myself than the good of other people. Well, what I found particularly helpful in this passage is he talks to us about what can make a heart of love possible.

And in so doing, he also tells us what hinders that heart of true love from coming out of our lives. He says, the end of the commandment is charity out of a pure heart and out of a good conscience and out of faith unfeigned. Those are three very critical characteristics that must be there in order for love to be demonstrated in and through our lives as it ought to be.

The first one is out of a pure heart. You know, true love, this true concern for the good of others can only come out of a heart. That’s what this verse describes as a pure heart.

The idea of the word pure is unmixed. It’s a heart that beats for one, you could say. This is a heart whose motives are not mixed.

Their motives are for the good of one. Now it’s not for, believe it or not, this is going to sound funny, it’s not for other people. The heart is first and foremost for God.

In fact, as I was thinking about the unmixed nature of this heart that this verse is talking about, I was thinking This is a heart that’s totally dedicated to one thing, to the will of God. This is a heart that’s not out to pump oneself up, to be pompous, to be proud. It’s not a heart that’s out to prove one’s point.

It’s not a heart that’s out to make oneself look amazing. This is a heart that is sold out to one person completely. You know what we call that here on the Thee Generation Podcast?

We call that total surrender. It’s the life that doesn’t want to make a name for himself. It’s a heart that wants God to be lifted up, that wants the will of God at whatever cost might come.

A pure heart is a heart that’s totally surrendered to the Lord Jesus Christ. Can I tell you, young person, you might be dabbling around in this stuff. You might be saying, you know, yeah, sure, I want to help people.

But are you totally surrendered to Jesus? Because until your heart can be considered pure in the sense that it’s totally surrendered to one and one thing only, it’s not half in, half out, that’s the only heart that love can truly come out of. Not only is it a pure heart, it says also, and, of, and the idea that word of is from, a good conscience.

This is a conscience that isn’t hurt. You know, young people, sometimes we do things in our lives and we know deep down inside we’re wrong. We may not be able to point to a chapter and verse that says that you shouldn’t do this, but deep down inside, we know it’s not what mom and dad would want.

Deep down inside, we know God isn’t pleased, and yet we can’t necessarily prove it, but we go ahead and we do it anyway, and we hurt our conscience. You know, young people, some of you, you’ve been messing around with a young lady, and you know it isn’t right, and yet you’ve made excuses and you’ve done it anyway, and your conscience is hurt.

Some of you listen, you watch things on your computer, on your phone, that you know are edgy. You know that God would not approve, and you may not be able to point to a chapter and verse on why that YouTube video wasn’t right. You know deep down inside it is, and you watched it anyway, and you hurt your conscience.

Some of you, you have things in your life that you do on a regular basis. They would be what could be considered doubtful things. You maybe can’t prove it from the Bible, but every time you play it, you wonder, I wonder if there’s a better way that I ought to be spending my time.

Each time the Holy Spirit puts a check in your spirit, and though it may be pleasurable and enjoyable, you just wonder, you just wonder if maybe this isn’t what God would have, and you do it anyway. And can I tell you, you hurt your conscience is what you do.

That part of you that God gave you to tell you and to guide you and to, if I can say, it’s the part of you that makes you feel guilty when you do wrong, that part of you is telling you, you ought not be doing this. And a conscience that’s hurt is a life that is not going to be able, according to this verse, to exhibit charity or true self-sacrificial love. Lastly, here he says, and of faith unfeigned.

So we’ve got to have a heart that’s totally surrendered to God. We’ve got to have a conscience that’s clean, which means we need to, if we haven’t, confess these things, deal with these things with the people that need to know. But lastly, we’ve got to have real faith.

You know, honestly, when I first saw this, I thought, wait a minute, you can’t fake faith, can you? I mean, what is fake faith? Is it even faith at all?

Because it seems to be what he’s saying, and a faith unfeigned. In other words, faith that’s not just a put on. And of course, again, you listen to this podcast, you know where I’m going, total dependence.

But you know, total dependence can be fake. Do you know that? Total dependence can be fake.

How do you know if your faith is fake? I’m not talking about salvation here necessarily. I’m talking about your faith and dependence upon the Lord.

How do you know it’s fake? Well, I’ll tell you, it’s not fake if you don’t feel it. That’s not what I’m talking about.

It’s not fake to depend on God to do something you’ve never seen him do before. That’s not fake faith. Fake faith is faith that doesn’t do anything.

It’s like this. James 2 said, faith without works is dead. And in essence, what he says is, listen, you may say that you have faith, But if you don’t act in dependence on God, you don’t have faith.

You have fake faith. And you know what, young people? You may believe that God wants to use your life to turn the world upside down with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

You may believe in your mind that prayer can move the hand of God. You may believe in your heart the fact that God is good. But what are you doing about it?

Maybe at the Youth Summit, you said you believed that God wanted to use you to reach somebody with the gospel. And maybe you even told other people, I want my life to make a difference in the lives of others. Well, you know what fake faith is?

Fake faith says, oh yeah, sure, uh-huh, yeah, uh-huh, I’ll do that. Yeah, I believe that. But he doesn’t ever open his mouth to talk to anybody about Jesus.

That’s fake faith. Fake faith says, oh, I believe that God answers prayer. but you never pray.

That’s fake faith. See, real faith is faith that doesn’t just believe that God can do something, but it’s faith that acts on the basis of the fact that God can do something. It’s a faith that’s willing to get out there and not just believe about God, but depend on God to do something for him, to step out upon his promises, banking on God to step in and do what he promised to do.

See, fake faith is faith that doesn’t do anything. Real faith is faith that steps out of the boat upon the promises of God, saying, God, if you don’t do this, I’m done for. You know, that was Paul’s goal for whoever these people were that were teaching things that they shouldn’t be teaching.

In fact, it’s interesting in verse 6, and I’ll leave you with this. He says, from which some, having swerved, have turned aside unto vain jangling. You know, we know that word swerved, right?

It means just what it sounds like. You know, you’re on the car and a deer jumps out in front of you. You swerve out of the way, right?

You miss the deer. And what he’s saying is these people have missed love. They’ve missed it.

And in fact, he says, and have turned aside. In other words, not only have they swerved, they missed it, is the idea of that. They careened off the road of love, right?

And he said they turned aside unto vain jangling. That’s an interesting sounding word, isn’t it? And the idea of that is things that don’t really matter.

Instead of hitting love, so to speak, instead of hitting the target, which is meeting the needs of others, doing the will of God, depending upon God to do that with a clean conscience. Instead, they’ve swerved, they’ve missed it, they’ve fallen into the ditch of vanity, of meaninglessness. And this is not the main point of my podcast here today, but you know what happens when a believer misses a life of love?

They spend their life, their hours, their days on meaningless, profitless pursuits. I’m talking to some young people today. You’ve spent hours over Christmas break on your Xbox or on your phone playing some stupid game that honestly does not impact the kingdom of God at all.

I’m not going to tell you that video games are a sin. But I can tell you this with absolute dogmatism. They don’t do anything for the kingdom of God.

I’m not saying we can’t waste time every once in a while. I’m not saying we can’t have recreation. But young people, if you don’t have a purpose for your life, if your heart is not pumped to meet the needs of those around you, whether that’s because you’ve got mixed motives or whether that’s because you’ve got a hurt conscience or whether that’s because your fake faith isn’t doing anything.

Listen, young people, if you don’t have a purpose for your life, if your life isn’t oozing the love of God for other people, you’ve got to do something with your time. And you do. Here’s what you do with your time.

You waste it. You waste it. These people in these verses were wasting their time arguing about scenarios and historical things that really honestly didn’t even matter.

When there were people who needed to be challenged and helped, when there were people outside of their church that needed to be won to Christ, These people were arguing about stupid things that didn’t really matter while people were dying and going to hell all around them. Kind of sounds like a teenager today, doesn’t it? You know, people, my purpose of this podcast is not to berate you.

Not at all. My purpose of this podcast is I just want you to see that actions have consequences. And I want you, my goal for you is I want you to live a life of love and not waste your teenage years because you had a hurt conscience or you weren’t totally sold out to Jesus.

You weren’t willing to step out of the boat and do what God had called you to do. Your life can have great impact in the kingdom of God now. And my prayer for you is that you would totally surrender to the will of God for you, and that you would totally depend on his power, not just to talk about it, but to step out of the boat and meet the needs of some people around you.

Go do it, all right? Go get right with God. Go deal with those things.

Get your conscience clean. Let’s do something for Jesus Christ here this week. Thanks for listening.