Fending off Wolves | Titus 1:10-16

Dr. Grant Castleberry preaches "Fending off Wolves" from Titus 1:10-16 at The Lord's Day Service at The King's Chapel, Sunday, May 17, 2026.



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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Would you bow with me one more time? Heavenly Father, I pray, Lord, that you would now speak through me in the power of your Holy Spirit. If there is anyone here who does not yet know Christ as their Lord and Savior, we pray that you would open their hearts to the truth. We pray, Lord, that all of our minds would be sharpened, would be renewed, and in so doing, we would be transformed more to the image of Christ. We pray this in Christ's name. Amen. Well, put your finger in Titus 1, but before we get there, I want you to turn over to 2 Peter. It's uh right towards the end of your Bible to chapter 2 of 2 Peter. And you'll see why momentarily, but the uh the title of the message this morning is fending off wolves. Earlier in the week I said the title was dealing with wolves, and then I realized we needed a stronger verb. So we're we're now to fending off the wolves. Look at 2 Peter 2, verse 1. But false prophets also arose among the people, underline that phrase, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the tr the way of truth will be blasphemed, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. So several things to notice, I think, that are very important. One, you you see Peter emphasize that the false teachers come from amongst the congregation. In other words, they don't look necessarily like outsiders. They look like they belong. Last week we were at a wedding and we were explaining to our children this phenomenon of wedding crashers. They're like, what's a wedding crasher? It's somebody who's not invited, but they wear a tuxedo and they come to get the free food. But they look like they belong. In other words, the wolves don't look like sheep. They come in and they peddle false teaching. And the other thing I want you to notice that Peter says, what is their motivation for doing this? It's almost always one of these two things. Verse 2, he says, Many follow their sensuality. Their sensuality. You know the name David Koresh, Joseph Smith, Muhammad, all of them were deviants. And secondly, he says, verse 3, and in their greed they will exploit you with false words. In other words, they're trying to make a buck off of you. They're trying to exploit your wrong thinking with false teaching in order to deceive you, and in deceiving you, they can make money from you. Now, false teaching is very dangerous. The reason why I use the word wolves to describe the false teachers is because that's the word Paul used in Acts chapter 20 when he spoke to the Ephesian elders. He said, Fierce wolves will rise up from in your midst. So wolves, what do they do to the sheep? Have you ever seen a wolf eat a sheep? I know we talk about these in fairy tales and that sort of thing, but it's it's very violent. It's awful to see a wolf tear apart a sheep, break its neck, and then the pack devouring a sheep. But yet that's the picture that we're to understand with false teachers. Why? Why such a picture? Because what false teachers do is they pollute the mind. They pollute the mind. The mind is so important in the Christian life. Remember, Paul said we are to be transformed by the renewal of the mind. So in your mind, you think rightly. You think according to the truth, according to the knowledge of God. And then the Holy Spirit uses that thinking to then sanctify you. And that's why Paul said in 2 Corinthians 10, 5, he says, We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ, that we destroy any falsehood that would wage war against the truth. And so the mind, listen, is so important in the Christian life. I was talking to a guy named Keith Matheson this week, and he had been discipled by a person you probably have heard of, R. C. Sprohl. And Matheson was telling me about the Ligonier Study Center up in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, and then Francis Schaefer's Study Center in Labris, Switzerland. But both Schaefer and Sproul were very concerned that young people, college students and young adults, begin to learn how to think rightly about the things of God, about the knowledge of God and about the gospel. So it's very important that we are able to teach positively the Christian truth. But then what is Satan trying to do at every step as we're teaching faithfully sound doctrine? What does he do? He inserts counterfeit doctrines. And it's devastating to people's lives. When people imbibe falsehood and then to build their life off of lies, it ends up leading them to hell. So this is deadly serious. Deadly serious. How they operate, how we can identify them, how do we understand who they are? And here in this passage, Paul gives instructions on identifying them and what to do with them. But he's really going to tell us how we understand who they are in two ways. In verse 10 and 14, he's going to describe how we can know them by their teaching. And then in the other verses, how we can know them by their fruit. What do they look like? So how do we know them by their teaching? And then how do we know them by their fruit? So if you look at verse 10, notice what he says. And again, this dovetails right off what we studied last week about elders being able to rebuke those who contradict the truth. So this example is given as a polar opposite. He says, There are many who are insubordinate, empty talkers, and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision party. So Paul is describing the state of Crete and the churches in Crete, and he says, in and around the churches, there's a problem, Titus, that you and the elders will have to address. And that is there are many, many who are insubordinate. That word insubordinate simply means that they refuse to obey apostolic teaching, all that Christ taught and commanded. He says, There are many who are empty talkers. I saw this translated in one place, windbags. There are many speaking nothing, speaking idly, just babbling on. Just nothing of substance. Gentle platitudes. You can do it. With Jesus added on to it. I grew up in Houston. There's a guy at the Compact Center in Houston, and he gets up every Sunday and he tells a joke. Three guys went into a bar, that sort of thing. He tells a joke. He says, I always do this to get people's attention and you know that sort of thing. He's worth a hundred million dollars. You know what I'm talking about? Osteen. Osteen. And he talks about nothing. Just how you can be better, how you can pull yourself up, how you can be a kinder person. And by the way, if you give money to the church, God's gonna bless you financially if you sow a seed. Do you remember Jesus getting up at the Sermon on the Mountain telling a joke? And just idly talk. You know, before I get to the Beatitudes, let me just tell you about these three guys who went into a bar. Let me just tell you about this guy on a deserted island. Okay, now you're listening. Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the earth. Or Peter at Pentecost. Holy Spirit falls. There were a couple guys in a No, that's not what they do. Souls are in the balance. Preach the word, Paul said, in season and out of season. 2 Timothy 2.16. Avoid a reverent babble, for it will lead people into more and more ungodliness. And then he says, deceivers. So insubordinate, empty talkers, deceivers. And that word means a misleader of the mind, someone who tricks people, somebody who imports ideas that are contrary to apostolic doctrine. That's what it means. So what were these false teachers teaching? What were they saying? And we can piece it together a little bit. It's hard to put together exactly what they were what they were teaching, but we're given clues here in these seven verses. First thing that they were doing is that they added to the gospel. These false teachers added to the gospel. And we see this in this next phrase. He says, notice, especially those of the circumcision party. Now, the circumcision party, if you study how that phrase is used in the New Testament, it simply means those who were converted Jews. It means those who were Jewish who came to believe in Jesus. And at first you remember all the Christians were Jews. All the Christians were Jews or Jewish proselytes. And it was through the book of Acts that we see the gospel going forth to the Gentiles. And there were all sorts of questions about that. Do Gentiles have to obey the food laws that the Jews kept? Do they have to keep the Sabbath? Do they have to be circumcised? And at first they thought this. Remember, Peter, though, had a vision, Acts chapter 10, and God tells Peter, you know, a pig coming out of the sky, some barbecue. Take and eat, Peter. He says, by no means. And then some, you know, tells them that three times, and he takes them to Cornelius' house. And then Peter later relates to the Jews. They can't believe it. You're saying it's fine to eat bacon? Yes, it's fine. This is what God has said. But that was the circumcision party, the Jewish Christians. Now there was a group who rose up in the circumcision party of the Jews. So it was a subgroup of that group. And this group was called the Judaizers. And this group taught, yes, we believe in Jesus. Absolutely a hundred percent. Jesus is Messiah. But in order to be saved, you also must keep the law. And by the way, the Gentiles, if they want to be saved, they also must keep the law. So this group of Judaizers rose up, and this became a huge problem in the early church. So when you read Acts 15 about the Jerusalem Council, the whole issue is about the Judaizers and people saying it's faith in Jesus plus something equals salvation. And of course, what happens when you add anything to faith in the salvation equation? You negate faith. Because you end up, if you're saying, I believe in Jesus and I also believe in my good works and my keeping the law, you immediately ask the question, how much good works get you in? And you immediately, in reality, trust in the good works and not in Christ. And so the reformers articulated very clearly, sola fide, we are saved by faith alone. Solus Christus, we're saved by Christ alone, not your own work. And we're saved sola gratia by grace alone. Apart from works. Ephesians 2, 8. For by grace you have been saved through faith. It is the gift of God, not of works, so no one can boast. So this was the issue. If you read the book of Galatians, this is the issue. And you remember Paul even tells the story when he was in Antioch, and Peter's there, and Peter was eating with Gentiles, probably eating some nice barbecue, and all of a sudden a group came from Jerusalem, and Paul says they were from the circumcision party, but they were Judaizers. And when they came, Peter stepped away from the Gentiles. And Paul said, I had to rebuke him to his face because he was out of step with the gospel. How was Peter out of step with the gospel? Because he was holding up something in addition to Christ for salvation. So listen very carefully, those of you who came and maybe you're just thinking through what are the claims of Christianity. This is it. The only way that sinners like you and me can enter heaven is by the work of Jesus Christ and Christ alone. Only He is the Savior that has died in the place of sinners and rose again from the dead, ascended to the right hand of the Father. Only Christ is salvation, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which you can be saved. No other name. People don't like to hear this, but Jesus himself claimed, I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. The only way to have a right relationship with God, to not enter into judgment, is by faith in Jesus Christ alone. And when you add anything to that, and I don't care how helpful you're trying to be, you are blaspheming the gospel. Paul said, if you preach a different gospel, let that man be anathema. Let that man be damned. Because it is dangerous to add to the gospel. Paul says, jot this reference down. This is Colossians 2.16. Therefore, let no one pass judgment on you in questions of food and drink, or with regard to a festival or a new moon or Sabbath. He's talking about Jewish dietary laws. Sabbaths. Adding things to the to the gospel. He says, these are a shadow of the things to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. So important that we understand this rightly. The Eastern Orthodox Church, all the different segments of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church. Sadly, these groups have confused this very issue. Confused it. We took a group to footsteps of Paul. It was really a uh also a Byzantine church uh tour because in every place they've built a Byzantine church on the historical location where Paul went, and you go into the Byzantine church, and we just talk to people. Ask them, if you were to die, how sure are you, zero to a hundred, that you would go to heaven? I'm 70%, 75%. I'm trying to be trying to be a better person, trying to pray more, I'm trying to go to the church more. But they don't understand the gospel because their churches have added works to the gospel. So, and that's exactly what these false teachers were doing. They were adding to the gospel, moreover, they were adding to scripture. Look at verse 14. Skip down to verse 14. Paul says, not devoting themselves. He's telling them, rebuke them, so that they're not devoting themselves to Jewish myths. Jewish myths. Now, Jewish myths, we can piece this together, were fanciful, fictitious stories that Jews passed down, sometimes sensual in nature, and they were completely speculative. They were just made up. They were not biblical, they were oral stories that people told about the Bible. Probably they dealt with different names and genealogies. The reason I say that is because when Paul addresses false teaching again in this letter in Titus chapter 3, verse 9, he says, avoid foolish controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. And so they engaged in speculative theology, adding to scripture. Adding to scripture. Listen, when John wrote the book of Revelation, we call it the canon, which means the rule, but the canon of the books that are authoritative was closed. There is no book 67. So it's a telltale sign when somebody says, an angel named Moroni gave me extra revelation when I was up on a mountain. Whenever somebody begins to say, I have a new word from God, watch out. Because now what they're going to do is they're going to pull a power play on you. Yes, of course, I believe the Bible. They add to Scripture. And then thirdly, they add to the Christian ethic. In other words, they are legalists. They invent new rules, new laws, new standards. It's not the law of Christ. It's not even the law of the Old Testament. But they come up with these new guidelines that people have to abide by. So if you look at verse 14, he says, commands of, the actual word is men, commands of men who turn away from the truth. And that phrase, whenever that phrase is used, it's used twice in the Gospels. A variant form is used in Colossians 2.22. But whenever that phrase, commands of men, is used, it's used to describe the laws of men that are being used to replace the law of God. So for example, Jesus says, Matthew 15, 8, this people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me. Listen, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men. So do you remember the the in Second Temple Judaism, the Pharisees, the The scribes made up all sorts of rules that were to extrapolate the Old Testament law. So they made different extraneous rules that weren't biblical, that Jesus was confronting over and over and over and over again. Jesus, why aren't you washing your hands? Why aren't you washing your hands, Jesus? Don't you know that it's what proceeds from the heart and out of the mouth that defiles the man, not what comes into the mouth and into the stomach that defiles the man? Jesus is confronting this all the time. People that are saying you must abide by the practices of men. So most likely they made rules regarding what you could eat. They made rules about marital relations. The reason I say this is because the parallel passage in 1 Timothy 4, Paul addresses people that were saying that you have to abstain from food, marital relations, these types of things. So they were into adding rules to scripture, legalism. And friends, I know that that's what false teachers do, but at the same time, we must be careful that when we are giving instructions on sanctification, that we are not holding up a legalistic, unscriptural standard over someone's head. You must put your kids in homeschool. You must eat gluten-free. You must put your kids in private school. You must go to the gym four times a week if you're going to be part of this church. I was talking to somebody this week, and they grew up in the Mennonite community. Amish, Pennsylvania, right? And he was saying that when he would go to church, the pastor would be out measuring what the women were wearing. Looking at what the men were wearing, were they dressed appropriately? And I asked him, I said, Did they have the gospel? And he said, No. They had lost the gospel. Because when you start adding these rules, you lose what's important. The gospel changes you from the inside out. We're going to see this momentarily. And then that causes you to desire to obey Christ. And of course, we lift up the law of Christ. We're not anti-nomian. Anti means against Gnomian law. We're not against the law. Of course, we believe in a moral standard. But the moral standard is obeyed as a result of the gospel transformation of your heart, but not in order to earn your salvation. And of course, listen, we need to be very careful that we're not inventing laws in addition to the moral standard of the Bible. The Bible has enough laws for me. I mean, is that I mean, am I the only one? Do we need more rules?

unknown 25:13

No.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

So all of these things, the asceticism, these rules that they held up, the Jewish legalism, the fanciful myths that they were teaching, all swirled around in Crete to make a kind of anti-gospel cocktail. And it was infecting the different churches. So next, Paul turns to how you identify them by their lives. So that's what they teach. Then he says, This is how you can identify them by their fruit or their lives. He's going to describe four qualities about them that you can look at. The first quality is that they seek shameful profit. In verse 11, he says, they must be silenced, since they are upsetting whole families by teaching for shameful gain what they ought not to teach. That word silenced, it's the only place in the New Testament this word is used. It's a word that described a muzzle on a dog. You just it clips the jaws shut so they cannot open. Paul's saying, these guys must be silenced. How would they be silenced? He says later, they need to be rebuked. And if they do not listen, they are to be turned out of the church. This is what we see in 1 Corinthians 5, Matthew 18. They're to be rebuked, and if they will not listen, they are to be turned out of the church. Why? Because what they will do, what they do is they upset whole families by their teaching. How do they upset families? Well, it is a very existential, damaging thing to tell someone that they must do A, B, C, and D in order to get to heaven. Because every day when I wake up, my conscience is clear. And I don't worry about where I will go when I die because I'm resting in the true promises of God. Amen? Because I know in whom I have believed. All who call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. I know what Christ has done. I'm looking outside of myself to Christ. It's wonderful to live the Christian life. I'm not scared of death. If my children or wife were to die, I'm not afraid. Because death, where's your victory? Where's your sting? But then what if I tell you, Lee Corso, not so fast? You do need to work. You do need to do some set of you, you do need you do need to deny yourself. You do need to obey the Jewish food laws and sabbaths. And oh, by the way, have you checked into these uh stories I'm telling about the genealogies from Chronicles? There's some inside baseball here in what I have. It begins to lodge doubts in the mind. It begins to cause, especially immature believers, baby Christians, to be unsure. Where do I stand with God? I thought we stood on grace, but you know, Tony, he's a trustworthy guy. He's telling us that we got to do these things. What inevitably happens when a false teacher does this is the people that begin to listen to them, they begin to go to him. Because now they're dependent. You know, Tony's telling me what I need to know. Forgive me if your name's Tony, by the way. I just he's telling me what I need to know for my soul. Oh, Tony, you need a little bit of money? Absolutely. You're you're helping us get to heaven, of course. We'll pay you that money. We'll move on to that compound with you. We're all going to heaven. Tony's got the secrets. This is how these wolves operate. They get in for the money and for the sensuality. And secondly, so not only do they seek shameful profit, they live worldly lives. So you look at their life and you do not see Christ. You do not see holiness and sanctification, you see worldliness. Now, this is really interesting what Paul does. Paul must have known something about Del Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. Because he doesn't just outright attack the Cretan culture, although he does. Because look what he says. He says, verse 12, one of the Cretans, he quotes this uh poet, this Cretan poet from 600 years before. He says, this poet said, and they called him a prophet. Paul's not saying that he was a biblical prophet. The Cretans referred to him as a prophet. He said, Cretans are always liars, evil beast, lazy gluttons. Wow, what a description of the Cretan culture. Next verse, Paul's gonna say, This testimony is true. So this is the culture. There's some people, some sociologists and some, you know, if you go to university, people will tell you that all cultures are created equal. Have you heard this? All cultures are equally good. No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh the more a culture is enlightened by the truth of God's word, the better the culture is. But what net what inevitably has happened through history, if you read uh or watched the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, is cultures are started in a place of more virtuous, and then they decline over time. As they go further and further away from God's revelation, they descend. Cultures are always in a place of descending, and sometimes, by God's grace, revival, God renews the church, and then that begins to renew the culture, and the culture becomes more godly and Christ-like. But the Cretan culture was bad. It was like Las Vegas. Bad. That the people, there was a verb to Cretanize, to Cretize, and it meant to lie. So literally, uh a verb in the Greek language was used that described dishonesty in the language of Crete. Cicero, the philosopher poet, said this moral principles are so divergent that the Cretans consider highway robbery honorable. So if you look at what Paul says, quoting the poet is named Epamenides. Cretans are always liars, they don't tell the truth. They're evil beasts, that means that they're violent, they do bad things for gain, and they're lazy gluttons. They don't want to work. When I read that description this week, I was thinking about one of my favorite Westerns, the good, the bad, and the ugly. I was thinking about Tuco, who's the ugly. Never works, always robbing people, killing people, trying to get shameful gain. Such was the case at Crete. And what Paul's saying, the reason why he's bringing this up, is I think one, it's a helpful reminder of the power of the gospel. That the gospel had gone to this culture and had transformed lives. Do you have to be a moral people in order to receive the gospel? The answer is no. In fact, it's often the wicked who understand foremost that they need a savior. And so the gospel had come to this wicked culture filled with lazy people, liars, and violent men, and the gospel had converted them. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to the Jew first and then to the Greek. The gospel can convert any sinner. It's powerful. But Paul says, even though the gospel has done this work, he's saying, rebuke the false teachers sharply, because their lives look like the rest of the culture. Their lives look like the world. They're not counterculture, they look like the culture. They look like the world. Remember, James said, James 4, 4, you adulterous people, do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? And these false teachers looked exactly like the culture around them. Third, they devoted themselves to falsehood. So they're out for shameful gain, number one, they're worldly, number two, and they devoted themselves to falsehood. This is really important because what false teachers do is they get off on a false tangent and they devote themselves to it. Like a dog with a bone. They just stay there. And they stay on these genealogies, they stay on their false teaching, and they become obsessed with that reality. A few years ago, there was a movement within the church called the social justice movement. Y'all remember this 2015 to 2000, really 2020-21. And there was a guy who entered the PhD program with me at Southern, and he quickly left the program. But this guy imbibed the social justice teaching that it was really a Marxist grid that put everybody in categories of oppressor or victim based on your ethnicity, language, sex, all of those things. And this guy bought into that hook, line, and sinker. And I pulled up his name on Amazon, and ever since then, he's been writing books, and he's been writing books about the same thing: wokeness. He calls it social justice, but it's it's wokeness. And he's been doing it for the past seven years. He stayed on that thing. There's a guy at UNC, Bart Ehrman. His thing is he questions the validity of the gospels in the New Testament. And he fancies himself a textual critic. And he writes book after book after book after book, challenging the inerrancy, inspiration, and authority of the New Testament. These guys are dogs with a bone. They get off path, and then they become devoted to that path. And then fourth and finally, they have defiled minds and consciences. Look at verse 15. To the pure, all things are pure. But the defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure. Both their minds and their consciences are defiled. So they don't have a renewed mind. If you're a Christian, you have, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 2, the mind of Christ. You're given the mind of Christ. You begin to think in a Christian way when you are regenerated or born again. These false teachers are not born again. They're not Christians. They have a defiled mind and a defiled conscience. And notice what Paul says, he says, to the pure, all things are pure. Now, some have taken that verse out of context and said that it means that if you're a Christian, you can do anything and it's pure. You can have illicit sex, you can use drugs, you can get drunk. If you're pure, all things are pure. It's not what Paul's talking about at all. Obviously, Paul never sanctioned diluting the mind. Ephesians 5.18, do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit. The body is the temple of the Holy Spirit. We are to be holy. What Paul is referring to is this whole thing that we saw about asceticism and Jewish food laws. He says in 1 Timothy 4 4, he says, For everything created by God is good. Everything. I said squirrels because my great-grandfather used to hunt squirrels. But you weren't supposed to eat those in the Old Testament. I always thought that was weird, by the way, but don't judge me for that. I've never eaten a squirrel. He says, for it is made holy by the word of God in prayer. On the other hand, he says, if you are impure, even if you do, quote, the holy things, you are still impure because it flows from an impure mind and an impure conscience. Paul says, anything that does not proceed from faith is sin. Because the mind is motivated by wrong motives. So the everything the unbeliever does, everything the unbeliever does, even if it's quote, obeying some sort of Old Testament law, it's polluted, it's polluted by their impure, defiled mind, everything that they do. So maybe they they do a good action, but in their mind it's out of a desire to prop themselves up before God. Something like this. Everything is polluted that the unbeliever does. Our two-year-old son, we uh he he does everything with us. Like, you know, he's the fifth, and we just bring him along everywhere we go. So we'll be at these uh youth events out here, and all the youth have their Dr. Peppers and their Cokes, you know, their their sugar water. And we call Truman, Truman's name, nickname is the drink burglar. Because you you kids will take a Dr. Pepper, take a few sips, and put it down and go play basketball, and then all of a sudden Truman's over there, he's drinking their their Dr. Pepper. So he just goes, he goes from drink to drink and drink. But here's the here's the problem. Once Truman takes a drink of your drink, it's done. Because he had those Doritos in his mouth, and he's backwashing all of that back into your Dr. Pepper. And so it doesn't matter how good that Dr. Pepper is, we love our Dr. Pepper from Texas. But if Truman's drunk the Dr. Pepper, it's done. Pour it out, throw it away. The drink burglar struck. And that's kind of the idea that Paul's getting at. He's saying, if it's from a polluted person, everything's polluted downstream from that. You don't come back from that. And so what needs to happen is, and the reason why Paul is saying rebuke the false teachers is that the hope is that they would repent from their false teaching. They would repent from their dead works, and like all of us, come to the Lord Jesus Christ in faith. That is the hope. That is the goal. Now, verse 16 is a summary statement. So this is a summary statement of everything we've covered. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their works. So you see it. And here's the tricky thing. These false teachers, they're not just uh, they're not saying I'm an atheist or I'm not a Christian. They're claiming to be Christians. They profess to know God, but they deny him by their lives. They are detestable, he says. They are disobedient to the word of God, and they are unfit for any good work. John said in 1 John 2 3, he says, By this we know that we have come to know him if we keep his commandments. Whoever says, I know him, but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. So Paul gives These instructions, and that includes concludes his instructions about how to identify these false teachers, about their false teaching, and about their false lives. And the response is that the elders are to rebuke them. Now, here's the thing. Do you think Satan is sending false teachers into watered-down prosperity churches? They're already there. Where is he sending the false teachers? Bastions of the truth. He's trying to penetrate the truth fortresses that are in the world with false teaching. They creep in unnoticed, just like those wedding crashers we talked about. They come in and they purview their false teaching in order to lead people astray. And I'm sure, I am sure, just as the sun came up this morning, that we will be dealing with this in the months and years to come. So all the more, we talked about last week about knowing sound doctrine, all the more reason why we need to be pressing into sound doctrine because in that way we will be able to spot the counterfeit. Now, is it costly to confront false teaching? It is. Name ring a bell. The bishop who distinguished himself at Nicaea standing for the doctrine of Christ. People remember him for uh for standing for the deity of Christ at Nicaea and for the triumphal victory at Nicaea, the Nicene Creed. But what many people forget is that after Nicaea, there was a new emperor after Constantine who bought into the Arian doctrine that Jesus was not God, but was like God. And for years, Athanasius was on the run from the false teachers. They hunted him down and they tried to kill him. At one point he was on a boat on the Nile and a faster boat was behind him trying to catch him. Athanasius, smart fellow, pretty quick witted, said, Let's turn around and go past him the other way, and maybe they'll think that uh we're someone different. And so sure enough, they came to the to the to the quicker boat and they said, Hey there, we're looking for Athanasius. And he said, Keep rowing, he's on ahead of you. And they kept going and he survived. My point is that standing for the truth is sometimes costly, and we have to be prepared for those costs. Amen. Amen. Lord, we want to stand for the true gospel, the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. Sola gratia, that we are saved by grace alone. Solus Christus in Christ alone, sola fide by faith alone. Lord, we stand for your truth, the word of God, all 66 books, infallible, authoritative, inspired by the Holy Spirit. And we stand with the law and ethic of Christ, the law of God that is given to us in the scriptures, not adding to it or taking away from it. Lord, if there's anyone here who does not know Christ, I pray, Lord, that you would open their eyes to the truth, that they would repent of their sins and trust Christ today in faith. Lord, our desire is to grow in grace, to grow in godliness, that we would be transformed by the renewal of our minds. For Christ's sake. Amen.