Keeping Calm in the Last Days

Scripture:  2 Timothy 3:1-9

I. Christians have difficulty in the last days because of moral decay.

A. Paul describes the moral decay of the last days with 19 negative characteristics of people in the last days. The last days began with the death and resurrection of Jesus and the sending of the Holy Spirit on the church. Paul wants Timothy and the church at Ephesus to be outraged by the accumulation of evil and wickedness within people in the last days. This list of evil characteristics is found in 2 Timothy 3:2-5. We should expect then opposition to God and His people to grow from the people of the world.

B. The people of the world have disordered loves. They love the wrong things. The negative 19 listed in vs. 2-5 say that people love self, they love money, they don’t love good, they love pleasure, and they don’t love God. Bottom line: people in the last days are selfish. Paul writes about immoral behavior by people who were inside the church and claiming to be Christians. These were the false teachers of 2 Timothy 2. Paul is warning Timothy and us to watch our doctrine about Jesus carefully. False doctrine often leads to immoral behavior.

II. Christians have difficulty in the last days because of religious decay.

A. The key verse in 2 Tim. 3:1-9 is vs. 5: “having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people.” The false teachers look like Christians in going to church and doing what other Christians do in a church service. But they don’t believe the Gospel, and they don’t live godly lives. Paul warned the elders at the church at Ephesus where Timothy was the pastor about these false teachers in Acts 20:30: “and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things, to draw away the disciples after them.”  

B. Timothy might have been discouraged by the apparent success of these false teachers in gathering a crowd and money in listening to their teaching. But Paul said they wouldn’t get very far (vs. 9). They would be just like the Egyptian magicians Jannes and Jambres who tried to appear as powerful as God and Moses. Their folly was plain to all (vs.9) and so would be the folly of the false teachers. Jesus gives a solution to the Ephesian church for the moral decay and religious decay in the last days in Revelation 2:4: “But I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love that you had at first.” Return to your first love for Jesus.

Application:                                                                                                           
A fresh love for Jesus will stop decay and bring new spiritual life.   

Sources:
The Bible
Commentaries by Andreas Köstenberger, R. Kent Hughes, and Phillip Jensen.

Sermon Discussion Questions

1) Are the last days in the future or are they right now? Have you seen evidence that people are as bad as Paul writes about in 2 Timothy 3:2-5? 
2) What do the immoral people described in chapter 3 love? What should they love instead? Have you seen a connection between false doctrine and immoral behavior?
3) Why do we not need to panic about the teaching of the false teachers? What will become evident about the teaching and the false teachers? How is their teaching powerless? How is the Gospel, by contrast, powerful?