The church needs a growing number guardians of the gospel who, strengthened by the grace that is in Christ Jesus, recognise false teaching and teach the truth empowered by grace to one another.  Is that you?  Not a heresy hunter, but a gospel of grace teacher.  Taught so that you can teach others in whatever context that is.

Paul’s second call that flows from the first, is to multiply guardians of the gospel. Those who know grace and strengthened by grace contend for and teach the gospel.
It’s not good to be alone.  That’s a universal truth of the human condition, it’s the way God has made us.  It’s true for Adam in the garden and it’s true for us today.  But it’s also true for us in serving Jesus in the church. It’s true for ministers and for ministry leaders. A sense of loneliness in ministry, of bearing the burden and responsibility alone is incredibly isolating and weighty.
Whose job is it to guard the gospel?  Be honest, what’s your first answer?  We live in an age of professionalism, where we pay people to do jobs, take responsibilities, so we don’t have to.  And so in many churches the answer, not in words but in reality, would be it’s the pastor’s job to guard the gospel.  Or maybe the elders job.  And there is some truth in that.  They do have a particular responsibility to do that.  But it’s not solely their responsibility.
In 2 Timothy 2v8 Paul tells Timothy that he must train up others who will teach others.  Timothy needs to train up guardians of the gospel there in Ephesus, how?
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The Bible seems to tell us that Satan was a created being, that Satan was among the first of the creatures. He was one of the angels that was created and then fell from that position. He chose to rebel against God, and as a result, the Scriptures seem to say that He was thrown down, he was cast out of heaven. And we’re told that he led many with him. So it wasn’t just Satan by himself, but there were many, if you will, fallen angels that followed him in that rebellion against God. The question comes as a result of that: if it is true that Satan was an angel, created good to serve the Lord and yet rejected that place of goodness, if you will—rejected that service of the Lord and chose instead to rebel against God with many other of His fellow angels—if that is true, how in the world did Satan choose that? Sin and evil must have been in the world already for Satan to be able to choose evil or to choose sin, rather than choosing to serve God.
The Origin of Evil
And so the question then comes as a result: if that is true, if the Bible’s comments about Satan and the fall of Satan, the casting out of Satan, is true, then where did evil come from? How was evil even there for Satan to choose in the first place? And I think what I’d want to say to that question is that evil is not a substance. Evil is not something that needed to be created in order to exist. Everything else that is had to be created. And we’re told that God created everything that is by the Word of His power, and sustains it still today. But evil, I want to suggest, is not a thing. It’s not a substance. Rather, it’s the privation or absence, denial of a thing.
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The command here is nearly identical to Ephesians 5:18, but instead of the command being to let the Spirit fill us, the command in Colossians 3:16 is to let the Word of Christ dwell in us richly. The implication is that these are related concepts, and thus the content of the filling is the Word of Christ.

Likely the most important truth about the Holy Spirit’s active work that we must remember is that the Holy Spirit always works through his Word. Through his illuminating power, the Spirit opens our minds and hearts to accept and submit to the authority of the Word that he inspired. And thus it is through such submission to the Word that the Spirit sanctifies us. This is critically important to recognize: the Holy Spirit will not sanctify us apart from his Word.
In fact, this is exactly what is indicated when Paul commands us to “be filled with the Spirit” (Eph 5:18). Like Spirit baptism and illumination, Spirit filling is another work of the Spirit that has been significantly confused in by errant teaching, but careful attention to the biblical text will give us clarity as to the exact nature of this work of the Spirit.
Sometimes in Scripture, language of filling is used to describe the special empowerment that the Spirit gave to key leaders of God’s people during important periods in redemptive history. In the New Testament, these all appear in Luke and Acts, where Luke uses the term pimplēmi, in which the grammar clearly indicates that he is the content of the filling. These leaders were filled with the Spirit in a unique way that empowered them to lead God’s people.
In contrast, Luke uses the adjective plērēs five times in which the grammar indicates that the Spirit is the content of the filling and that this is a figurative expression. In other words, these cases describe individuals who are characterized as being “spiritual.”1 Similarly, in one case Luke uses the verb plēroō in Acts 13:52 to describe the disciples as characterized by spiritual joy. This is similar to when we might describe someone as being a “spiritual” person or a “godly” person. What we mean is that the person’s life is characterized by qualities that identify him with qualities of God himself.
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