Chastity is the form of love that fulfills the seventh commandment. On one hand, chaste people restrain, deny, and mortify the impure passions of their soul and the lustful impulses of indwelling sin. On the other hand, as Christ gave Himself for His people, chaste people give themselves fully, freely, and undividedly to the other. In worship, that is to God; in marriage, that is to their spouse; in other relationships, that is to their brother or sister or neighbor, according to what is proper to each relationship. 

In a recent music review, NPR’s Ann Powers gushed over a female artist’s decadent and unrestrained sensuality that apparently runs throughout her latest album. It is not surprising that the recent release was the opposite of chaste, or that Powers celebrated its “utopian eroticism” as a great virtue. Chastity, the virtue of self-control in things sexual and sensual, is supposedly a relic of a puritanical past.
But it’s not that simple, is it? Most of my neighbors still want and expect their spouses to be faithful. They teach their children, with varying degrees of success, not to become sexually active, view pornography, or use vulgar language. So maybe chastity is not as much a relic as pop culture and social media may suggest.
Then again, when was the last time you read a piece by a contemporary author commending the virtue of chastity, or even heard the word used in a positive, non-fetishized way? The loss of chastity—and of commending it as a common virtue—is more tragic than any of us probably realize. That much of the church seems to be silent is sobering too.
Chastity is an exquisitely beautiful form of love. It is love that is genuine, true, undivided in its devotion, and fulfills its vows (see Ps. 51:10; Rom. 12:9; 2 Cor. 11:2; Phil. 1:10). Love that “issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith” (1 Tim. 1:5). Paul writes that this type of love is, “the aim of our charge” and the mark of “sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God” (1 Tim. 1:5, 10–11). It is Christlike love.
The virtue of chastity shines a spotlight on the purity of love. As God is pure, so also are His words, wisdom, and deeds (Pss. 12:6; 19:7–11; Hab. 1:13; James 3:17). Those who represent God in church office, therefore, are to faithfully embody the purity of His love. The evidence of a candidate’s purity of heart and mind is found, among other places, in his faithful and undivided devotion to his wife (1 Tim. 3:2, 12).
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We must view false teachers the way God describes them. We must see their teaching as that which can sink a soul into the pits of hell like a reef takes down a cruise ship or oil tanker. We must see the doctrine they teach like sea foam filled with death and decay, knowing that they are fruitless and uprooted, awaiting God’s judgment, and then we should be spurred on to guard our own doctrine even as we pray that some will be snatched out of the flames.

Since the beginning of time, there has been a war against God’s truth. From Satan’s fall to the garden of Eden to the false prophets of Ezekiel’s day who cried “peace” when there was no peace, to our day, there have always been those who speak against God’s Word and lead God’s people astray if they can. The world has always known false teachers.
In our day, we are bursting at the seams with them. Everyone knows they exist, even if they are unable to identify them, but not all seem to realize the danger they pose. For some, false teachers are the fringe group that is better ignored; for others, they are just Christians who think differently than we do. So how do we rightly view false teachers, and are they as threatening as some suggest?
We should first define what we mean by a false teacher. What we do not mean is someone who gets a doctrine such as the issue of baptism wrong. That would be an error, not a heresy. When we think of a false teacher, we think of the example given by the Apostle Paul, who writes to the Galatian Church, “But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed!” (Gal 1:8). A false teacher distorts the gospel in some way. In other words, false teaching often touches the person or work of Christ. Doctrines such as salvation by grace alone through faith alone, the sinless life of Christ, the deity of Christ, the penal substitutionary atonement of Christ, the gospel, and the necessity of repentance, are non-negotiable doctrines, and to teach anything contrary is to become a false teacher.
A second distinction of a false teacher is someone who, after having an error corrected, refuses to adjust his teaching. Of course, we all teach error, and for most of us, if we realized where that error was, we would correct it. But refusing to correct an error once exposed as an error makes one a false teacher when we speak of central doctrines that affect one’s faith. One has to move from “I didn’t know what the Bible said” to “I don’t care.” At that moment, a false teacher is born.
In the book of Acts, Apollos is an excellent example of someone teaching an error because he was teaching the Baptism of John, not knowing anything different. However, when corrected, he adjusted his teaching accordingly, and it is said that “he powerfully refuted the Jews in public, demonstrating that Jesus was the Christ” (Acts 18:28).
So the first question is: just how dangerous are false teachers? Secondly, how do we respond to false teachers? To answer these questions, there’s no better person to turn to than Jude, the half-brother of our Lord. Jude paints the most robust imagery of the false teacher anywhere in Scripture. He describes false teachers using five main illustrations and, in those, answers the question, “how dangerous are false teachers?”
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When God makes a vow we have no reason to ever doubt His word. It is sure and without fail. That’s really what perseverance is all about. The deep knowledge that when the Lord has elected us before the foundation of the world to be His covenant people, He has fashioned a vessel of mercy to carry about in it the righteousness of His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ. It’s such a gift that is beyond compare.

Over the past five months we’ve been walking through T.U.L.I.P. on Sunday nights at Bethany. Now, for those of you who may not know what that means it is an acrostic which spells out some of the basics of the Reformed faith. Those things that we believe about our redemption purchased by Christ. How we came to be in need of it, and the way that God has provided an answer for it. As an aside we’d love for you to join our merry little band on the Lord’s Day evening for this time of growing in faith together through the fellowship of the saints. One of the benefits of that second service is that it allows us to close the Sabbath with a word of reminder of God’s grace and love for His people, a booster if you will to get us ready for the week that is to come. But we’re not going to talk specifically about evening praise in this morning’s prayer and worship help. I want to go back to that whole T.U.L.I.P. thing for a second.
The “P” is what we are on now, and it represents the Perseverance of the Saints. First of all I am thankful for the little red squiggly line that appears in Microsoft Word, because for reasons unknown to me the word Perseverance is in the list of words, like pharaoh or irregular that I misspell all the time. I guess I just need to persevere until I get it right. But seriously, for the Christian outside of God’s sovereign election, Jesus’s atoning death for dead sinners, and the Lord’s gracious grant of faith the reality is nothing is more important for the believer than to be reminded that when we are told that our Redeemer has provided eternal life for His people we are to understand that the word eternal means what it says.
When Jehovah makes a promise we have the assurance that He will do it. Part of the witness of the Book of Hosea is to illustrate this truth. In the third chapter of that portion of Holy Scripture we see the prophet say, “And I said to her, ‘You shall stay with me many days; you shall not play the harlot, nor shall you have a man—so, too, will I be toward you.’” There is a clear exposition of what we mean when we talk about the doctrine of perseverance. Remember the situation in Hosea. He has taken Gomer, a loose woman, a prostitute, to be his lawfully wedded wife. She is depraved, a sinner, ungodly, but he has taken her on as his own flesh and blood, in accordance with Genesis 2 and Matthew 19.
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