Lesson 6 | Grasp the Anchors & Aims
What’s at Stake: Stewardship
Gain:
Being faithful stewards for God
When Paul left Timothy behind at Ephesus, he urged him to prevent false doctrine from being taught to the church.
What was Paul after? He tells us in v. 5: love within the Ephesian church. But not just any love will do. Paul goes on to explain that his goal is love motivated by the right things. Only if they would love one another because their hearts beat to do so (“a pure heart”), only if it was true (“a good conscience”) and stemming from a genuine belief (“sincere faith”) in true gospel doctrine (v. 3)—only then would the Ephesians be rightly stewarding the grace God had given them (v. 4).
Bottomline: Only when we get the motivations right, does God call that faithful.
Loss:
Chasing after the wind
The passage goes on to make clear that some people in Ephesus have indeed been unfaithful to their stewardship from God in this very way.
“By swerving from these,” Paul says. What does he mean by “these”? It is not the “charge of love” in v. 5, as then he would have said, “by serving from this.” No, most of the folks Paul is describing here still have love for God and the brethren, but their motives are starting to slip. They are swerving from the good motives of “a pure heart, a good conscience, and a since faith”—and to swerve from these is no trifling matter. Ultimately, it can lead to shipwreck of one’s faith (v. 19). But even short of that we can see from these two verses the sheer meaninglessness of discussion it leads a Christian into, turning him into an empty-brained, self-confident blowhard.
From this one example, it is evident that much is at stake in getting the motives of Scripture right!