1Tim 6:20&21

“Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.”

What are the things that have been entrusted to your care? There are a lot of things you’ve been entrusted with. Your school work, your family, and your friends were all examples that I heard last weekend. In this chapter, though, I think Paul was talking about two things specifically. First, he was talking about the first church at Ephesus. Several times in the 1 Timothy, Paul tells Timothy how important it is that he stay there and keep spreading the gospel. So, one of the things he’s been entrusted with are the people of the city who may not know about Jesus yet. The second thing would be the message of the gospel.

That second part about Godless chatter and “opposing ideas” were people saying that Jesus isn’t the way to salvation. Paul was talking about Tim being entrusted with the gospel and keeping the message of Jesus pure from corruption. At that time in history, only about 50 years after Jesus had been resurrected a religion called Gnosticism was starting to surface in Ephesus. Gnosticism was an early heresy (that’s a religion that takes a little bit of one religion, but completely changes it) that taught people we’re saved by knowledge, not the grace of God. The word Gnosticism comes from the Greek work “knowledge”. You see what he means when he says “ideas of what is falsely called knowledge”?

Do you think this is something we still need to resist today? You betcha! There are a lot of ideas and ways of thinking that try to take God and Jesus out of the way you view the world or how things work. Turn away from that nonsense, and guard the thoughts and people that are most precious to you.