Good morning church! I never really like naming sermons, and if you go through my google drive you will see that 90% of the sermons that I have ever preached are named after the reference of the text that they’re coming from. Actually, let me just say this is one reason why I am so thankful that we are a church that just preaches through books of the Bible. Sometimes I see sermon titles from churches that don’t have the same preaching philosophy as us and it just blows me away with how creative they can be with their sermon series. I don’t know how they do it… BUT this was a sermon that I did name and actually enjoyed naming. I’m calling it Godliness: An end to the means. It’s got a double meaning to it. It means that godliness puts an end to our worldly desires but it also means that godliness is the end of why we do what we do as we walk with God. We cultivate desires that grow us in godliness.

We all have “ends” to why we do what we do. When my wife was a teacher in the classroom, administrators constantly reminded her to “remember her why.” In sports, we say things like, “play for the person next to you.” In corporations we talk about creating value for shareholders. I think that finding the end to what we do helps us do the thing that we are wanting to do even better, I actually think that it makes us do what we do the best that we can do it. I can show you the difference between a college football team who has one game on the calendar circled as a must win and a team that is focused on the goal of winning a national championship. Having the right motivations and going about something in the right way are how we are to live in the household of God.

It’s incredible that we are almost at the end of this letter. As Paul is concluding his writing to Timothy, he calls him again to embrace godliness.As we have seen over the last couple of weeks, godliness is devotion to God and to others. A  godly life is devoted to God and to their neighbor.

This passage is Paul telling Timothy to not let someone come into the church who is teaching the false doctrine that practicing godliness will achieve us material gains. As we are moving to the end of this letter, we are going to need to think back to some earlier parts of this letter to understand in context what Paul is warning Timothy of. Paul is correcting the false doctrine that Hymenaeus and Alexander were spreading in the Ephesian church. Hymenaeus and Alexander had been promoting a form of asceticism, or giving up earthly things like certain foods and even marriage - things that the Lord has said are good, as a means of gaining religious and societal merit. That’s why in verse 5 Paul says false teachers imagine that their godliness is a means of gain. Paul has already corrected Timothy on what is right in regards to marriage, paying the pastors in the church, drinking wine, and not requiring abstinence from certain foods. In this section, Paul shows that godliness is not how we get the things that we want, but that godliness is the purpose of our new desires. 

First point for us to consider today is that godliness kills our craving to seek satisfaction in the world. This is one way in which I mean that godliness is an end to means. It’s why Paul dedicates a chunk of these verses to talking about generosity. It’s why he talks about people trying to use faux godliness so that they could receive in something in return.

The issue that Paul is needing to correct here is that there have been some who have been trying to use the Gospel, to use their godliness, as a means to gain things for themselves. The false teachers that Paul is warning about are people who are puffed up with conceit and understand nothing. They have “an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth.” Paul contrasts these false teachers to those who have godliness with contentment.

Contentment is being satisfied with what we have. Contentment often flies in the face of what we are told is valuable in our culture. Being satisfied with the things that we have often flies in the face of the Gospel that we hear around us. We are told that our value is tied to the things that we produce. Our value is tied to our net worth, or our salary, or our new role at work. Often, even in the church, we don’t consider what the Gospel of grace says about our satisfaction. 

In the church we often tie our value to the things that we don’t do. We have in our mind that if we can abstain from certain desires that we have, God will finally be pleased in us. If we can do some hard work, pull ourselves up by the bootstraps, and white knuckle our way out of a desire, then we are being godly. Or to give an example from 1st Timothy, I forbid marriage, because it’s more holy to be single and you can go overseas and be a missionary tomorrow if you need to and I am going to skip out on foods that aren’t clean because it makes me holier when I pass over that food at the buffet. We tie our contentment to our abstinence and we say things like, “because I am skipping out on this, now God will bless me in the future.”

I think we have seen an example of this in 1 Timothy already. Paul tells Timothy that he should drink some wine because it will help with his stomach problems. Wine isn’t something that we need to abstain from thinking that it will make us holy. Paul did make it clear that over consuming wine isn’t something that honors God, but Paul explains to Timothy that drinking a little wine is actually good for him and not something that he needs to abstain from. Now to be fair, this is first century medical advice and something you need to consult with your Doctor about before applying to your life.

Contentment eliminates our cravings not through the lie of abstain and be blessed, but because it makes us satisfied. So Paul telling Timothy to call the Ephesians to godliness with contentment is him calling them to satisfaction! It’s him telling them to rest in the satisfaction that only God can really provide.

I want to make sure that I’m clear: not all desires are inherently bad things. It’s fine for us to desire something. It’s not wrong for us to desire friendship, companionship and family relationships that are not difficult. I even think it’s okay for us to desire earthly things. What Paul is specifically cautioning towards is manipulating the gospel message to achieve the worldly things that someone desires. I’ve always wanted a boat, specifically a Super Air Nautique Paragon. It’s like the gold standard of wakeboarding or wakesurfing boats, it’s also $300,000. I’ll literally never have this boat and I have gotten to a point where I am more than okay with that. What Paul is warning against here is someone who would manipulate the message that Jesus has already revealed, so that they can have enough to receive the things that they want or even crave. 

Paul tells us to be content with food and clothing. If we experience a lack of satisfaction with those things and God and the church then we should reconsider our priorities and our loves. But I believe that if we are devoted to God and neighbor, then we will be satisfied with having unity with Christ, the clothes on our back, and food that we can eat. This is why Paul says in verses 6-8, “But godliness [being devoted to God and others] with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world and we cannot take anything out of the world. But if we have food and clothing, with these we will be content.”

What happens when we drop things or add things that God hasn’t told us to drop or add and think that it will make us more godly, is that we are the ones who are really trying to define what godliness is. When we embrace asceticism in the name of hoping to make ourselves like God, we are short circuiting the way that God has designed for us to function.

There’s this drug that has become really popular for people hoping to lose weight. It’s called Ozempic, it’s a semaglutide. It’s really a type 2 diabetes drug because it stimulates your pancreas and helps produce insulin, but a lot of people have been taking it to help with weight loss. How it works for weight loss is that it actually tells your body that you are satisfied, even if you aren’t. It actually reduces hunger and enhances the satisfied feeling in our brain that we have after a meal. I think Ozempic is to diets like what asceticism is to godliness. We can do something that tricks ourselves into saying, “I’m satisfied! I must be godly!” By giving up things that we don’t need to and that we even shouldn’t so that we might receive the things that we actually desire.

It’s hypocritical to think that we can give something material up so that we can gain something like godliness. There would be two motivations that I can think of for why we might try to do that. 1. Humans have always wanted a God that is made in their own image, original sin causes us to rebel instead of wanting to live in God’s image and under his authority. Us giving something up hoping to receive material gain, is us trying to make a god in our own image. A god who will bend when we tell him to and do what we want, not what he has planned. It’s us telling god that we know better than him. And the only god who we know better than are the ones that we craft with our own hands.By us trying to give something up so that we can gain something material, we are confessing that we want a god who we can control.

The second reason I think we would try to give something up for the sake of material gain that we actually crave is because we want to appear extra blessed to those around us. To accomplish this, we are willing to lay down something that we don’t actually care about for the sake of gaining something of material value that we actually crave. So we do our Hymenaeus and Alexander song and dance and practice “holiness” that we want to practice so that we can gain something that we actually care about and want. False teachers and hypocrites don’t sacrifice the things that they want for something they want more, they’ll forsake something that they don’t care about hoping to gain the thing that they really want.

If godliness is devotion to God and to neighbor, then the hypocrite tries to make a god in his own image, one who he can tell where to go, what to do, and want to give him. And the hypocrite looks to do anything he can to make his neighbor impressed by the measure of his spirituality and piety in hopes to profit off of them.

What true godliness does is that it changes our very desires into something that produces contentment in us. Asceticism is hypocritical because it pretends to sacrifice for God when in reality it's just trading one worldly thing for another. Godliness looks paradoxical because it permits enjoyment of all manner of worldly pleasures, only to freely set them aside because it's satisfied with something better. So Paul is saying, "Don't mistake my poverty for asceticism. I didn't give up being rich because it's wrong. I gave up being rich because I found something better. True godliness makes the things that we do make sense for the right reason. Godliness is the purpose of the new desires that we have.

Godliness provides purpose for our new desires

In 1 Timothy 4, Paul charged the Church to continue on in training ourselves in godliness. Paul says that if we aren’t working on growing our godliness our sin will be killing us. Paul has reminded Timothy a couple of times throughout this letter to remind them to continue on in faith, love, and holy conduct. Next week we look at a text where he again will call them to be chasing after, “faith, love, righteousness, godliness, steadfastness, and gentleness.” 

In this passage Paul tells Timothy to consider how generosity is tied to godliness. He wants the Ephesian church to be a church that is moving towards godliness in the way that they practice generosity. So not only does godliness satisfy our craving for worldly desires, but it gives us a purpose for the new desires that we have. 

Generosity is not something that makes any sort of logical sense. For centuries, philosophers have claimed that the secret to find happiness in life is to consume, to dominate, to think primarily about one’s self. But this idea flies in the face of being devoted to God and being devoted to others. True godliness requires us to put ourselves third; God first, others second, and ourselves third. And right now Paul is calling the Ephesians to do this through practicing generosity. If we were only about ourselves, practicing generosity would just be a bad business decision. Show me someone who is preaching the Gospel for their own material gain and I will show you someone who has no interest in practicing generosity.

When we are regenerated, our desires change. The worldly things we have desired are no more and they are replaced with a desire to walk in a way of life that honors and glorifies God with the things that we have and do. We practice generosity because it shows a devotion to God and to our neighbor. 

I want to walk through those two ideas, starting with how generosity shows devotion to God. We honor God when we are generous because it shows that we need him and him alone for us to be satisfied. I don’t know about you, but contentment and satisfaction has never been something that I have felt particularly good at. Generosity is the only thing that I have done that has helped me grow in satisfaction. It’s interesting because the times where I have been financially okay, but not practicing generosity are the times in which I feel the least satisfied. But when I was in college and not doing well financially but being generous with my limited resources, were the times in which I really felt satisfied. What matters is not whether or not I had scarce resources or abundant resources, but whether I believed that if I had food and clothes and God I had what I wanted to be satisfied.

Generosity shows devotion to God because it communicates our heart posture towards God. Generosity shows that we believe that having God is what we need. I don’t need my boat to be content, I don’t need a job with more influence, I don’t need a bigger house, I don’t need my retirement nest egg to have one more million, all I need to be content is food, clothes, and God. Contentment shows that we are rejecting the lie of self-sufficiency for complete and total Christ-sufficiency.

The last way that generosity shows devotion to God is through the fact that it models the very generosity he has offered to us through Christ. Jesus came to us out of abundance, but he gave us something abundantly more. Paul in Philippians 2 says that Jesus counted equality with God as something not to be grasped, but he emptied himself, taking on the form of a servant, and being born in the likeness of man. So that right there is great generosity, right? But Paul continues in explaining that he didn’t just live a life as a man, but that he went to the cross in our place, laying down his life for his friends. In Christ’s substitutionary death and resurrection we are given grace upon grace, and we are given a purpose to the things that we spend our time doing. True generosity is determined by how much we have and how much we give. Jesus having so much, gave so much more than we can comprehend. We don’t have the sort of capability to have as much as God has given to us. Generosity should always point us and others to Jesus. We can never be as generous as he has been to us, so our generosity should always remind us of the generosity that we have received in him.

Generosity isn’t something that makes sense apart from a relationship with Christ. That’s not to say that people can’t be generous apart from Christ, but generosity finds its purpose in Christ and what he has done. All of the training in godliness that we take part in finds their ultimate purpose in Christ. Because our generosity is just a broken image reflecting God’s generosity towards us, it should show our neighbor that we are devoted to them as well. Loving something like money wouldn’t be an issue if there wasn’t something so much better for us to love than money. 

Generosity towards neighbors shows godliness because God hasn’t just been generous to us. He has been generous to all of us. So godliness is devotion to God and neighbor, godliness with contentment requires us to be generous to our neighbor. I think Acts 2 is descriptive and not prescriptive when Luke is talking about how the early church used to interact with one another. But it’s always been incredibly compelling to me, nonetheless. Their number is growing daily, they’re holding all things in common, and they are selling their possessions and belongings and giving the proceeds to all, as any had need. This is how we model the generosity that we have been shown! It’s interesting too that it happens as people respond to the Gospel being preached and the covenant community being added to.

Our generosity towards one another reflects the love that has been shown to us by God who gave up much to save his people. In this passage, Paul reflects on how the love of money is a root of all evil. So we should be cautious that the way that we think about money is something that is choking the life out of our Spirit. John Owen has a famous quote that says, “be killing sin, or it will be killing you.” I think another way to say that would be, “be training in godliness, or sin will be killing you.” This seems to be the same point that Paul is making when he says, “It is through this craving [loving money] that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”

Giving is a really great barometer for whether or not you are a lover of money. If your financial advisor cringes a little as you talk about how much you are giving, then you’re probably okay. Our generosity is the best way to make sure that our money and our net worth is not being elevated to a spot in our heart where it should not be.

Conclusion - 

The truth of the matter is that generosity is not something that people naturally want to do. If it is, it’s for the wrong reasons and they’re being like the ascetics giving something up for the sake of receiving something better. A hypocrite abstains from something out of discontentment. He gives up hoping to gain a return. But the Christian paradox is that we give up out of satisfaction because Christ has met our needs. We no longer feel like we need to earn godliness because godliness has been given to us in Christ. And our godliness that has been given us is now the reason that we want to, and are motivated to, cultivate desires that help us grow in godliness.

And when we aren’t sure what godliness with contentment looks like, when we don’t know how to be a generous person, let’s look to Christ. Let’s model the sacrificial generosity that he offered to us in his incarnation, death, and resurrection. He has come to us so that we can walk in godliness for the right reasons and in the right way. Let’s pray.