1 Timothy 4:1-5 | Care for Your Conscience

If you have a Bible, grab it and open it to the book of 1 Timothy, chapter 4, verses 1 through 5.

In the last chapter, we looked at Paul giving Timothy several instructions on how he ought to conduct himself in the church, specifically around the structure of the church. Then he calls attention to Christ. Now, in light of that spiritual reality of who Christ is, Paul turns his attention to the dangers around and inside the church that threaten to break the church in Ephesus apart, as he exhorts Timothy to hold on to the truth of the Bible.

We see this in 1 Timothy, chapter 4, verses 1 through 5, which says this:

Now the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will depart from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared. They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods that God created to be received with gratitude by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, since it is sanctified by the word of God and by prayer. — 1 Timothy 4:1-5 (CSB)

Let's pray. Our God, even this morning, we want to be able to receive your Word with thanksgiving. So we ask, Lord, that you would help us. For those of us who are distracted, that you call us into focus. For those of us with sensitive consciences, that you would help us to calibrate according to your Word. For those of us who are harboring seared consciences, that you would awaken what is dead and call us to pay attention to what truly matters. We ask God that you speak to us now. We need your help, so we ask that you would speak to us through your Word in Jesus' name. Amen.

Calibrating Our Conscience

We are officially in spring. Some of you are still recovering from the hangover of Daylight Saving Time from last week. Along with spring also comes a series of changes. Historically, in Catholic churches, right now we are in the season of Lent. You might have seen some of your coworkers and neighbors walking around with ash on their forehead, which triggers not just the beginning of looking towards Easter, but the beginning of suffering. What are you giving up for Lent?

Often Christians like to practice seasons like Lent where you give up different worldly things in order to show dedication to Christ over worldly allegiances—being willing to avoid steak on Fridays, maybe giving up different social media that you use, giving up different hobbies that you may be obsessed with. I just want to be really clear in saying that it's probably good practice in general to do little heart autopsies and check in and do little tune-ups to make sure that we're not idolizing any of the things around us.

But this morning, I want to convince you that Lent isn't holy, that the practice of giving up worldly things that show dedication to Christ, the practice of doing things that you feel like in your heart might show that you're dedicated to the Lord, might not actually be what God wants from you. In fact, Paul is talking to Timothy here and believers to focus on what God actually commands, rather than whatever your heart may feel, whatever your conscience may dictate. Bigger than even the external rituals that we may practice to show everyone around us just how dedicated we may be.

And so the idea this morning is simple: God wants us to calibrate our conscience. What I mean by the conscience is that inner voice, the inner thermometer that we have as we evaluate things. When you feel guilty inside when you do something bad, that's not Jiminy Cricket; that's your conscience. Your conscience is also the thing that tells you that it's okay to do things that you think are fine. While conscience is a good tool that the Lord gives us, we also know that it's an imperfect tool.

Paul here is particularly talking to Christians in Ephesus that have a conscience that's veered off from what God's Word actually commands and has forced them to focus on things that ultimately don't really matter. So God wants us to calibrate our conscience. There are going to be three things that God wants us to do in order to calibrate our conscience: first, to expect evil; second, to reject unbiblical restrictions; and third, to celebrate creation.

Expecting Evil

First, let's look at expecting evil. Look again at verse 1 with me:

Now the Spirit explicitly says that in later times some will depart from the faith, paying attention to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons, through the hypocrisy of liars whose consciences are seared. — 1 Timothy 4:1-2 (CSB)

After instructing Timothy about church structure, Paul then turns his attention to false teachers that are in the church. You can see that in verses 1 and 2, these liars that are leading people astray. And he tells not just of his own personal warning to Timothy as his father in the faith, or as a pastor, or as an apostle, he warns about what the Spirit says will happen. The Holy Spirit explicitly tells Christians that people will depart from the faith.

A lot of people get disillusioned as you look out at society at different people that walk away from the Lord. Many of us grew up in churches where we saw peers, fellow students, even adults that claimed to worship Christ. Some even embodied a form of godliness that might have even felt greater than ours, and then they walk away from the Lord altogether. Church leaders get caught up in scandals where their words don't match up with their actual conduct. People that have thought one thing at one point and then decide to walk away from the Lord, and those things tend to rattle us, shock us, and make us wonder if we ourselves need to go back to the drawing board. Sometimes it even makes us question the efficacy of our own faith: Is God actually true? Is He actually capable of carrying me to the end?

What we see here in verse 1 is that when people fall away from the Lord, that's not a question of whether or not the Lord isn't powerful enough. It's actually proof that what the Spirit said is true. The Spirit Himself tells you that people are going to walk away. That's not just a possibility to God; that is a certainty. It's not a question of whether that will happen, but when that will happen. Modern culture today views faith as absurd. They view it as something that's unreasonable, and then apostasy becomes common and unsurprising. So what we see here is that walking away is proof of the Spirit's prophecy, not His weakness.

This apostasy is not new. This kind of stuff has always been happening since the early church. Sometimes we look at culture today and we wonder whether or not we're living in a new era, where we have new standards for truth, new ways of evaluating things. For instance, it's been the same for 2,000 years. Apostasy, people walking away from the Lord, is as old as Judas' betrayal. It's a recurring, practical reality.

And the truth is that people walking away from the Lord, people walking away from true Christian faith, isn't just a practical reality; it's also a spiritual reality. Notice what these people departing from the faith are doing, according to verse 1 and 2: "They pay attention to deceitful spirits and the teachings of demons." Their departure isn't actually a quest for truth; it's not an exploration of what's right. It's them falling into their own deception, the teaching of demons, of deceitful spirits.

When we see people fall, I wonder what that does to your faith. I remember when I was younger, I would see different Christian leaders fall away from the Lord, and I would think, "Well, they're not part of my theological camp, so obviously they fell away, they're wrong." And then I saw leaders that I myself look up to fall away from the faith, apologists that I listened to turned out to be heinous people, pastors that I thought were so sure of their salvation abandoned things altogether. Paul reminds Timothy, and it reminds each of us, that none of us should be placing our faith ultimately in any man, institution, or leader. Everything is fallible. As one pastor said, "The best of men are men at best." We ought to be trusting Christ, not any person or thing that we see in the world.

And these apostates pay attention to the teachings of demons. They follow these ideas that these demons are teaching. If you want to know how demons operate in the world today, they don't operate primarily through possession. They absolutely can do that. They don't primarily operate by possessing someone that does supernatural acts of evil in the world or try to scare you or spook you in your dreams. Demons target your mind, not your body. Notice what he says there: it's the deceitful spirits who try and trick you, and it's the teaching of demons. It's what they're teaching you. They're trying to distract you so that they can destroy you. That's the demon's strategy. We live in a spiritual world where demons are seeking to distract you, to destroy you.

Have you ever heard of this idea called the "mere exposure effect"? The mere exposure effect is this idea that as human beings are repeatedly exposed to the same ideas over and over again, it starts to shape your beliefs and your desires. It's a reality, we know this to be true. Think about advertisements that you see in the world: people smiling as a cold Coke glass bottle is condensed with water outside of it; people smiling as they gather in the living room around a Samsung television. Modern advertising is trying to show you something. A lot of people think that advertisements don't affect them, that they're not convinced immediately to go pick up a Coke or order a Samsung television right away. What you need to know is that that's not what those ads are trying to get you to do. These advertisers are actually smarter than you think. They understand today that the goal of an ad isn't to get you to automatically do an action, but to leave you with an impression.

Every single time that you look at an ad and you see the picture of someone smiling, holding a Coke, subconsciously you start to associate a bottle of Coke with happiness. In fact, they used to splice into movie theater projectors a frame of a Coke advertisement in the middle of your movie. It would happen so fast you couldn't catch it. And when they did that, the sales for Coke increased because positive images create association. They want to expose you to a product so that you get used to thinking of that product, and then you get attracted to that product. Impressions are more important than persuasion. And the same thing is true for what you believe.

There will be certain things that seem utterly absurd to you, and through repeated exposure, it starts to feel more and more reasonable to you, and then it will convince you. This is the same reason why conspiracy theories have absolutely exploded in the age of the internet, because the internet knows to repeatedly expose you to crazy ideas over and over and over again until you believe it. And that's exactly what the demons want to do to you. They want to distract you by deception, through hypocrisy, through searing your conscience.

Evil spirits erode truth through gradual persuasion, not by force. This isn't someone taking over you by a wave of demonic oppression. Evil entices you. It erodes in order to execute. You see a false teacher online and you start hate-watching him. And you keep listening, and you start to notice that they might have a good point here and there. You keep listening and listening and listening until you're persuaded that they're right. And once you're persuaded, your entire understanding of life has completely shifted underneath your feet without you realizing it. Hypocrisy starts to look like holiness. Sin starts to look like sincerity.

Your environment will expose you and influence you into thinking that certain things are normal when they're not. If you're not a Christian here today, I wonder what standard you use to measure what's correct. Is it yourself? Is it whatever the culture says? Is it whatever your favorite influencer or expert has claimed? Whatever that thing may be, that's where you've placed your faith. And I'll be honest, so do I. I do those kinds of things too all the time, except we need to just be honest with ourselves and with others in saying the experts, cultures, and even our own opinions change all the time.

We need some kind of metric or some kind of method to be able to determine what we think is actually true or not. And the way that we do that is by using Scripture. Don't listen to what I say behind this pulpit because I'm a really persuasive guy, or because I know how to talk without "ums" or "uhs" or "hoofs." You should listen to me based on whether or not what I'm saying is actually true. For the Christian, it should be based on whether or not God's Word actually says the stuff that I'm saying. We need to calibrate what we think by Scripture, not by human opinions, not by artificial intelligence. We need to calibrate things according to what we know to be absolutely true.

If your standard is the world or what's around you, you will just shift with whatever the culture says. If your standard is your family, you will be motivated by whatever ultimately achieves your goal. But if your standard is the Word, if you let God's Word speak, if you look at this immovable book and what it says, then let the Word determine what's ultimately true. That's why we value preaching in this church. The way we combat demons isn't by becoming more persuasive. The way we combat demons and the hypocrisy of liars and seared consciences is by looking to a standard where we can anchor what we think, where it's not just a matter of my opinion versus your opinion. The standard for a Christian is this book.

Theological debates are not just matters of what your pastor thinks versus what another Christian leader thinks. The question is, who teaches the Bible more clearly? What does the Bible actually say? And that's why when we preach, we seek to try to line up whatever we say from Scripture with whatever comes out of my mouth behind the pulpit. We call that expositional preaching. It's a big Christian SAT word. All we mean is that the words and goal from this book should control the words and goal that come out from my mouth. I shouldn't stand up on Sunday and say things I thought were interesting that week, or whatever rant I need to get off my chest. I need to stand up here and tell you what the Bible actually says, that "thus saith the Lord" doesn't become "thus saith John."

Preaching true Christian expositional preaching guards against the cultural currents that lead us towards destruction. And that's why it's also critical for us to raise up faithful preachers. It's part of why I'm excited tonight as Sam Wolford brings us God's Word in the evening and gives us a devotion. Sam will preach God's Word, not what Sam says. It's critical for preserving truth. This church needs to outlive me. And if we want to be able to do that, we need to raise up people who can teach God's Word faithfully, who can lift up what God says in contrast not to what other people think versus what I think, but what God's Word says in contrast to what demons may say.

Rejecting Unbiblical Restrictions

Which means we have point number two: reject restrictions. Look at verse 3:

They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods that God created to be received with gratitude by those who believe and know the truth. — 1 Timothy 4:3 (CSB)

These false teachers impose unbiblical rules. You see that they're forbidding marriage, right? They're utterly celibate, and they have restrictions for food—things that you can and cannot eat. And it's hard to think of two things that are more antithetical to the culture that we live in today. What does our culture love? Sex and food. Those are two things that we love to have, and the thought of avoiding them is almost unthinkable.

But I think that that attraction that the culture has towards these two things is precisely why the people in the church in Ephesus were so drawn to avoiding those two things. That when you live in a culture that seems to be drifting further and further away from good values, from good sense, from common family love and culture; when you see a culture that's increasing in riches and worldly goods where food is more readily accessible than at any other point in human history, where sexual promiscuity seems to be absolutely prevalent, I can see you getting disgusted by that and wanting to turn away from it. And that culture, of course, is the Roman Empire.

When you see sexual promiscuity in the temple, when you see people gorging themselves on godless foods offered to literal idols, and the knot in your stomach starts to twist and twist and twist as you're disgusted by what you're seeing around you, I can understand you saying, "Enough, I don't want any of this," and the pendulum swinging the other way. I'm sure all of us can feel tempted to feel that exact same way today: to look at the world and feel like it's slipping through our fingers and clamoring to recover whatever you can and lock it in the bunker. You look at the way that public schools talk about sexuality and you decide, "I'm going to keep my kid locked in my house, homeschool them forever, and stuff lest Caesar infect my kids with insanity." You hear inappropriate music on the radio and so you demand all radios be permanently locked to K-Love. You look at foods that are unhealthy for your body and so you pendulum swing the other way, so you try keto or paleo or whatever may work to help with your body.

And I'm not saying that any of those things are inherently wrong to do. It's not wrong to homeschool your kids or go on a diet or try to avoid the things of this world. I can even think of scenarios where it may be wise to do all those things that I just listed. But making those decisions are not the same thing as obeying the Bible. They're not the same thing. If we're being honest, sometimes our zeal is driven by panic and fear more than it's driven by biblical principles. We're so repulsed by evil pleasures that we become repelled by pleasure altogether. We think that because what's evil may make us feel good temporarily, that feeling good at all becomes a negative, and our decisions of refraining, our supposed moral living or visual examples of holiness, become a matter of showing everyone around us just how good we are. In other words, these kinds of restrictions or extra-biblical holy living is less about being actually virtuous and it's more about virtue signaling. It's showing the world that I'm a good person versus actually doing what God says.

I think about how repulsed you may feel if someone wears a hat in church. Adrian, you're fine, right? I remember just a couple of years ago, I was at a church where there was a deacon that would yell at anyone wearing a hat in church because, "How dare you disrespect the Lord like that?" Think about people giving up things for Lent and showing how sacrificial they are to those around them. I even listened to a pastor in a sermon explain in five different points why questioning the motivations of anyone who reads Harry Potter. Now, you can debate whether or not those things are actually good or holy or whether there's moral virtue in all those things. One thing that we can absolutely agree on: none of those things are in the Bible. There is no Bible verse that says, "Thou shalt not read J.K. Rowling."

And the problem with these kinds of virtue signals is that they create these extra-biblical standards by which we hit people with a "Christian side-eye." We start to question their motivation, and all of those signals that you send out into the world are distractions. They distract you from what actually matters. You start to become obsessed about not crossing a line that God never drew. He never told you to care about that, and it distracts you from pursuing real holiness. What's more important? Avoiding marriage or following the Lord with undivided devotion? What's more important? Avoiding unclean foods or keeping oneself unstained from the world?

This is exactly the accusation that Jesus brings towards the Pharisees. The Pharisees had a genuine desire, I think, to want to honor the Lord, except they were obsessed with virtue signals, not being virtuous. This is actually what Jesus calls out in Matthew 15 with their obsession. He tells them in Matthew 15, verse 17:

“Don’t you realize that whatever goes into the mouth passes into the stomach and is eliminated? But what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart, and this defiles a person. For from the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, sexual immoralities, thefts, false testimonies, slander. These are the things that defile a person; but eating with unwashed hands does not defile a person.” — Matthew 15:17-20 (CSB)

See, evil thoughts, not external actions, defile a person. You can obsess about avoiding the things that you determine to be ungodly all day and ignore the things that God actually wants you to pay attention to. And the struggle with ideas like this, like forbidding marriage and demanding abstinence from food, is that it makes you think that you could honor God by doing stuff. "If I just do these things that these demons are telling me to pay attention to, if I listen to Haminayas and Alexander as they tell me that I should be avoiding marriage and eat clean foods"—and you start to do that, you start to convince yourself, "Hey, I'm pretty alright, I'm doing those things."

But then that guy who got married, but then that person who ate pork—you start to feel better about yourself in comparison to others that you deem to be worse around you. But that rule-keeping distracts you from true devotion, from true devotion. Jesus doesn't just want you to avoid bad stuff. He wants you to be holy. He cares about your heart. He cares about what's inside. And once you understand that standard, once you understand what those rules are meant to do, that's when you're able to realize there is nothing that you can do to make yourself holy. You can live an entire life with chastity and with abstinence from food and still go straight to hell. You can live your entire life virtue signaling to your community that you're a good person and still go to hell. You can go to church every single Sunday, say the right things, wear the right clothes, pray the right prayers, and still go straight to hell. Because Jesus wants your heart.

And the good news is that Jesus is the only one that can change it. Jesus resisted temptation. He fulfilled the law perfectly. He lived a righteous life. He cared about the things that actually mattered. He wasn't scared of the world. He hung out with tax collectors and prostitutes. He paid attention to the heart of the law. And he lived a perfectly righteous life completely unstained from the world. And in exchange, he was treated like a sinner. He died on a cross. He paid the penalty for sin in full. God poured out the wrath that you and I deserve on His shoulders. And He died and rose again three days later from the dead.

The good news of the Gospel is not that you need to follow these particular steps in order to be good enough. The good news of salvation is that Jesus can exchange your heart of stone for a heart of flesh through His resurrection, through the good news of the Gospel. Jesus offers us grace, not more rules that we need to follow. God declares believers, Christians, to be righteous, not because of what we do, but because of who Christ is. What's so despicable about these kinds of actions or standards that we create is that whenever we redefine holiness, we change what Jesus came to do. Did Jesus really die just to show you a way to live your life without a spouse? Did Jesus really die just so that you can know how to dress and act when you come into church on Sunday? Of course not. Jesus came to make you new, to make you holy, to make you righteous in His sight. God alone gets to set that standard, and equating man-made restrictions with godliness distorts Scripture. True devotion to the Lord flows from Christ's saving work, not obsessive rule following. It's from knowing who Christ is and wanting to become more like Him, not just running away from the world.

Celebrating Creation

Which is why when we look at the world, we're also able to see glimpses of what God is doing and be able to celebrate those things, which leads us to point number three: celebrate creation. Look at verse 3 again:

They forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods that God created to be received with gratitude by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, since it is sanctified by the word of God and by prayer. — 1 Timothy 4:3-5 (CSB)

Everything created by God is good, and God's creation is to be received with gratitude and thanksgiving. Paul is giving a clear contrary command: Don't avoid it, celebrate it. Marriage isn't bad; love marriage, celebrate marriage, even pursue marriage. Abstinence from food is not bad. Or eating food is not bad, so eat it, enjoy it, love it.

Now, some twist this saying here and say, "Everything created by God is good" to then mean that everything in creation is permissible. So I've seen plenty of people claiming to follow Christ that will quote these verses to try to justify anything that they themselves may want in creation, to justify things like same-sex marriage or idolatry or greed, saying, "Hey, if it's in the world, then it's something that I should celebrate." But that's not what Paul says. Paul doesn't say that everything in creation is good. He says everything *created by God* is good. The standard that determines whether or not something is good is whether or not it is created, intended by God for that good. In other words, Paul is preserving God's gifts according to God's order. So you can't just say same-sex marriage is good if God did not create same-sex marriage. If He did not ordain marriage to be between two people of the same sex, you have questions about that, you can read Romans 1 and other examples like that.

God creates marriage and food for man to enjoy. Marriage is a joining of a man and a wife by God, according to what Jesus teaches in Mark chapter 10. Peter is told in his vision as he sees a tapestry of different unclean animals in Acts 10 that "whatever God has made clean, do not call impure." Even in creation, God commands humanity to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. And he tells them, "I've given you every fruit in this garden to eat except for one." God provides food, fruit for the garden, as well as marriage for humanity to enjoy. In other words, God creates good gifts in creation for your happiness, for your happiness.

Did you know that you have over seven trillion nerves in your body, capable of communicating to your brain this sensation of happiness, of joy? That your dopamine receptors can actually fire off and tell you, "You're happy right now. Whatever's going on right now, it deserves to make you happy"? And that's because God made you that way. He wants you to feel those things. He designed those nerves so that you can sense joy, so that when you eat good food, you actually delight in it. And when you enjoy the good gift of marital intimacy, you can actually delight in those things. God wants you to enjoy it.

Christians are not ascetics, nor are we Buddhists or Stoics. Delight is not a bad thing. Delight is actually the point. God delights in our delight in His good gifts. He wants you to enjoy those things. See, this is the solution to a prudish abstinence from pleasure. This is how we guard against this error that you see here in verse 3. Christians are meant to enjoy God's creation, but our enjoyment of it is in the order of God's creation, not against it.

We understand this intuitively, even when it comes to silly things. Like, you ever go to someone's house and they're super obsessed with board games, and they're really excited to play with you? What are they really focused on as they excitedly tell you about this board game? They tell you the rules. They want you to do it right. They want you to enjoy it in the exact right way. You think about anybody who's enthusiastic about any of their hobbies. Their delight is lined up with the right ordering of those things. It's the same reason why we care so much about things in society. Why do we advocate against racial injustice or advocate for the unborn? Because we value human life. Why do we want to encourage people not to commit adultery? Because we love marriage. We value it. And we want to preserve the sanctity of valuable things. In other words, Christian instruction isn't primarily restricting as much as it's protecting. It's not about just dictating whether or not you break or don't break a rule as much as it's focused on preserving the holiness of something that's valuable.

Think of it like a kite. When you fly a kite into the sky, the string actually gives the kite the leverage to be able to go up into the sky. And God's intended design allows us to take flight in the way that God intends us to do. But when we cut ourselves off in order to fly higher or fly differently, that doesn't enable the kite to fly higher; it crashes it into the ground. It's the same way when we follow God's law. The point isn't about just dictating what is or is not right. The point is that we are trying to preserve the goodness of God's creation. In other words, Christians aren't defined by what we're against, but what we're for. This changes everything.

This means that we can wholeheartedly speak against the dangers of sexual immorality while delighting in the marriage bed. This is what enables us to fight gluttony or restrictions from food while being able to delight in good food. And this is what allows us as human beings to fight against idolatry while enjoying God's good creation. Because a Christian sanctifies, purifies, according to verse 5, God's good creation by two things: by the Word of God and by prayer. That's what we do.

First, we sanctify by the Word. The Word of God becomes the supreme standard by which we determine whether or not we are obeying the Lord rightly, not our own feelings. Scripture becomes a compass that determines whether or not we're looking at that thing correctly. It calibrates us. It lines up according to God's will. A Christian should be able to look at these commands to not get married or avoid certain foods and ask the person, "Can you show me a chapter in verse? Can you show me where God commands us to do these things?" And by God's Word, you can determine whether or not something is true. It doesn't matter how intense someone argues against you, how persuasive they may be, how they paint a picture in reality. You ask them to show you in the Bible where that thing is a sin. You calibrate according to God's Word. You sanctify good things by God's Word. God delights in good creation; you see that even in Psalm 19, which was read earlier in our service.

Second, you sanctify things by prayer. "Nothing is to be rejected if it is received with Thanksgiving," that receiving gifts with Thanksgiving sanctifies the enjoyment of it. If you want to enjoy God's good creation like a Christian, thank God for it. Pray for it. Because that prayer connects the good gift with the giver. It's a little assignment for you guys this morning: When you eat lunch after this sermon and after this service today, please hang with me. I know you're hungry, right? But when you eat lunch today, take a second to deliberately, proactively think about God who made it for your enjoyment. The crackle of soda in the back of your throat. The delectable flavors of grain, meat, even vegetables. They were created by God for your enjoyment. So that as you eat, as you enjoy God's good gift, you get a little glimmer of God's good intent for you. The reason why that food tastes good is because God is good. The reason why creation is delightful and brings you a sensation of joy is because God is the fountain of joy and goodness. Every single good meal that you eat is like an hors d'oeuvre compared to the delight that you will have in God, compared to what you have in Christ. In other words, every single meal is an act of worship. It's an act of worship. It's connecting God's good gift to the giver.

In fact, if you think about it, all of life is an act of worship. Every good gift is given to us from the Father of Heavenly Lights. When you listen to music and you hear a delightful melody, connect the gift to the giver. When you enjoy solving a problem and you're able to accomplish something with your life, see how that gift connects to the giver. How you get to emulate the Creator of all things and ordering the creation around you. Even in your own marriage, for those of you that are married, sexual intimacy in marriage is meant to be a gift that points you to the goodness of the giver. God wants you to delight in it. It's God's gift to you. None of us should shudder at the thought about talking about these things because we're not prudes. We're not people who shun goodness, enjoy. We should be the biggest cheerleaders of those things. We love God's creation because we love to see what God does. It brings us delight. We should be fans of God's Word, of God's creation.

Evil twists good into bad and also twists bad into good. And Christians combat this by holy delight. The way that you combat evil's twisting or hypocrisy or lies is by clearly discerning that good things that they claim to be bad are actually good and the bad things that claim to be good are actually bad. We're really good at that second part. We're pretty good at looking at false teaching and saying, "That's wrong." I'm also saying the stuff that you might feel guilty about, you need to proactively work to feel good about. We need to let earthly joys stoke our heavenly appetite. Every act of Thanksgiving sanctifies creation, turning even the pleasure that we feel in this world into pleasure in God. This is the way that we combat legalistic prudishness. If you want to defeat Satan in your life, out-rejoice him. Out-delight him in both godliness and goodness.

Let's be a church that's known for being a joyful people. Not just against, not just defined by the things that we're against, but that we're defined by the zeal that we have for what's actually good, for what God actually made for us to delight in. We need to delight. We need to exalt. We need to prioritize both godliness and goodness, because when you look at Christ, when you look at Jesus and His work for us, and you see the creation that God has created for us, the Christian should be able to understand and realize that the pursuit of godliness and the pursuit of goodness are actually the same thing. We're pursuing the good God who made us. Let's pray.

Our Father, we pray that you would help us to actually delight in you, in your goodness and your holiness. Help us to not get distracted by various rules or restrictions. Help us not to be obsessed with rule following, but to see the value of holiness. See the value of your good creation. Help us to follow you and even delight in you today and in all the good gifts that you give to us, including the gift in Christ. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.