‘Always Learning but Never Arriving’ — Is That Me?
00:00:00.000 | Well, today is 9/11.
00:00:06.000 | It's a sober day here in America, but today's question is not about 9/11.
00:00:10.720 | Today we actually have a question about a haunting text in the pastoral epistles.
00:00:15.520 | The question comes in from a podcast listener named Amy.
00:00:18.600 | "Hello, Pastor Jon, and thank you for APJ.
00:00:22.280 | My struggle is deep and personal.
00:00:24.240 | I'm not maturing much in the faith.
00:00:26.840 | I forget just about everything I learn as soon as I learn it.
00:00:30.520 | Sermons pass in and out of my ears and I take away from them just about nothing, or so it
00:00:37.240 | seems.
00:00:38.240 | I fear I'm the one mentioned in Scripture as 'always learning and never able to arrive
00:00:44.200 | at a knowledge of the truth.'"
00:00:45.720 | 2 Timothy 3:7.
00:00:49.560 | Can you explain this verse to me, and what does it here mean to "arrive at a knowledge
00:00:55.960 | of the truth"?
00:00:57.760 | What would that look like?
00:00:59.080 | Pastor Jon, what would you say to Amy?
00:01:01.000 | Well, I'm very glad that Amy is even open to considering the possibility she might be
00:01:11.360 | like one of the women described in 2 Timothy 3, 6, and 7.
00:01:15.880 | That in itself is a mark of spiritual life, it seems, because very few women who in fact
00:01:23.800 | are the kind of women described in these verses would have any humility to admit that they
00:01:29.560 | were the kind of woman who's in these verses.
00:01:32.000 | So here's what it says.
00:01:34.120 | Let's get the verses in front of us.
00:01:35.640 | Paul is writing to Timothy about a certain kind of man who does certain things with women,
00:01:46.800 | and they are a certain kind of woman.
00:01:49.560 | And let's read now what's the man doing and what kind of woman is vulnerable to what this
00:01:54.380 | man is doing.
00:01:55.380 | Here's what he says.
00:01:56.380 | This is 2 Timothy 3, 6.
00:01:57.880 | "For among them," that is, those dangerous men, "are those who creep in to households
00:02:05.800 | and capture weak women, heaped up with sins and led by various passions, always learning
00:02:18.140 | and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth."
00:02:22.680 | Now, Amy wonders if her difficulty in not maturing as much as she would like in the
00:02:30.920 | Christian faith and in forgetting so much of what she hears in sermons, does this mean
00:02:37.960 | that she's one of these women who can never come to a knowledge of the truth?
00:02:42.640 | Now, I don't know Amy.
00:02:44.800 | I don't know the extent of what she thinks her weaknesses are.
00:02:50.440 | I don't know the quality of teaching she's receiving.
00:02:53.840 | I don't know her own battles with sin.
00:02:57.920 | So I'm in no position to pronounce about whether she could be in the category of these
00:03:04.140 | women in 2 Timothy.
00:03:06.500 | What I can do is describe the situation here in these verses with a little more attention
00:03:14.040 | so that she then can measure whether or not her particular difficulties that she's described
00:03:21.280 | put her in this category.
00:03:24.120 | My own sense right now, given what I see, is that she's not in this category, and you'll
00:03:33.760 | see why as we unpack these two verses.
00:03:38.760 | First, the women are described as weak women, so we must ask, "So what's the nature of
00:03:46.720 | their weakness?"
00:03:48.400 | And Paul leads us along the way toward the answer with the next phrase, namely, "They
00:03:53.760 | are heaped up with sins."
00:03:58.080 | It's a dramatic word.
00:03:59.960 | It's the same word as Paul uses in Romans 12 for heaping, coals of fire on people's
00:04:06.360 | heads, piles and piles of sins that these women are committing.
00:04:12.080 | So we should ask, "Well, what's the nature of the weakness that results in these women
00:04:19.880 | committing sin after sin such that they pile up?"
00:04:24.920 | And the next thing Paul says goes a long way to answering that.
00:04:29.500 | He says, "They are being led by various desires or passions."
00:04:35.880 | Now we're at the heart of the matter.
00:04:37.720 | They are always learning and cannot come to the truth, never arrive, because they are
00:04:44.480 | being led not by truth but are being led, controlled by desires, passions, instead of
00:04:55.040 | being led by the truth.
00:04:57.400 | So let's read backwards now.
00:04:59.600 | They can't arrive at the truth because they are controlled and led by all kinds of various
00:05:05.320 | desires rather than discerning and submitting to the truth.
00:05:09.480 | And being led by those desires, they are led into sin after sin, which creates a huge heap
00:05:16.800 | upon them, and that, Paul says, makes them weak and thus vulnerable to these rascals
00:05:24.840 | who are coming in with their false teaching and maybe even more abusive behavior than
00:05:30.180 | false teaching.
00:05:32.160 | These women are not like Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and absorbed so much truth.
00:05:38.720 | They're not like Priscilla, who understood the way of truth better than Apollos did.
00:05:44.680 | They're weak, meaning when desires come, they don't stand strong against them and
00:05:52.340 | govern them with the truth.
00:05:54.520 | They give way, and that's what it means to be weak here.
00:05:58.920 | They give way to sinful desires, and so they are led like a ring in their nose.
00:06:06.840 | They're led by passions, not truth.
00:06:10.580 | So they arrive at sin after sin, not ever-deepening knowledge of the truth.
00:06:17.680 | Now what can we say about this text that might help Amy get her bearings?
00:06:24.960 | Three things.
00:06:26.280 | First, Amy describes her main problem, as far as she can see it, as a problem of a weak
00:06:33.240 | memory, not a weak morality.
00:06:37.880 | The problem in this text is not that these women have weak memories.
00:06:43.960 | The problem is that they have no power to stand over against their desires and deny
00:06:50.040 | them and be led by truth against them.
00:06:53.320 | That's the problem.
00:06:54.760 | Now Amy will have to decide, I don't know Amy, she'll have to decide if that's her
00:06:59.720 | struggle.
00:07:01.040 | But it's not what she mentions.
00:07:03.040 | All of us have very different capacities for remembering things.
00:07:07.840 | I consider my own memory, my capacities to remember to be weak and getting weaker, by
00:07:15.320 | the way.
00:07:18.320 | Which means, and I mean always, I can remember in college taking history classes and working
00:07:24.200 | my tail off till two in the morning, memorizing dates, trying to figure out acronyms, remember
00:07:31.400 | places.
00:07:32.400 | And I had to work so much harder, it seemed, than everybody else just to get a B in this
00:07:39.240 | history class.
00:07:40.960 | Same thing with sermon preparation.
00:07:43.160 | To give a sermon or to give a talk where you just use notes instead of a manuscript is
00:07:48.560 | enormous amount of work.
00:07:51.840 | So God has made life harder for me in this regard, and I do not doubt that was his will
00:08:00.600 | and that it is good for me to have to work harder on memorizing Scripture than others
00:08:07.080 | do.
00:08:08.520 | And I would suggest to Amy that there may be simple strategies of, instead of rolling
00:08:16.180 | over and playing victim, there may be strategies of repetition and note-taking and journal
00:08:23.680 | keeping and so on that could supplement a weaker memory.
00:08:28.560 | That's the first thing.
00:08:31.640 | Second thing I would say is that the knowledge of truth referred to in verse 7 is probably
00:08:38.380 | not truth in general, but in fact the core message of the gospel.
00:08:45.760 | I say that because the way that term is used, the exact term in Greek, knowledge of the
00:08:52.240 | truth, 1 Timothy 2.4, 2 Timothy 2.25, Titus 1.1, you can look all those up and test to
00:08:59.360 | see if you agree with what I'm saying.
00:09:01.240 | The point I'm saying is these women are called weak not because they didn't have a systematic
00:09:07.380 | theology.
00:09:08.380 | That's not the issue.
00:09:09.560 | Coming to a knowledge of the truth doesn't mean coming to a knowledge of Wayne Grudem's
00:09:13.300 | systematic theology.
00:09:15.160 | The point is that in their desire-controlled hearts, they were so resistant to seeing the
00:09:23.780 | gospel as beautiful and desirable above all things that they could not understand it in
00:09:31.340 | any depth, and therefore they could not hold onto it as the treasure of their lives, and
00:09:37.240 | therefore they were led about by lesser desires.
00:09:42.640 | And the question I would ask Amy is, does she have a firm grasp of the gospel, of what
00:09:49.000 | God did in Jesus Christ for her in history and what he has done in her heart?
00:09:57.380 | Does she grasp that central core truth that is so stabilizing against being jerked around
00:10:04.580 | by our desires?
00:10:06.920 | And the last thing I would say is that just a few verses earlier, that is, chapter 2,
00:10:13.880 | verse 25, Paul had given the divine solution to the problem of not coming to a knowledge
00:10:22.540 | of the truth.
00:10:23.540 | Here's what he says.
00:10:26.120 | God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth.
00:10:35.120 | Very same phrase.
00:10:37.000 | In other words, ultimately, arriving at a knowledge of the truth is a gift of God.
00:10:43.680 | God may perhaps grant them knowledge of the truth.
00:10:48.060 | The bondage of our desires and the bondage of Satan, the blindness of our hearts, is
00:10:55.640 | hopeless, a hopeless condition, without divine intervention.
00:11:01.580 | So the remedy is to pray for God's mighty grace to break in and give us the victory
00:11:09.980 | over bondage to sinful passions so that we arrive at a saving knowledge of the truth.
00:11:18.420 | Very very helpful, Pastor John.
00:11:20.220 | Thank you.
00:11:21.220 | I hope you find this encouraging, Amy.
00:11:23.940 | Thanks for the great question.
00:11:25.820 | Keep those great questions coming in.
00:11:27.260 | And I appreciate all of you who've listened to the podcast to search all the episodes
00:11:31.260 | that we have published to date, or to browse our archive of episodes, or to submit a question
00:11:35.940 | to us like Amy did today.
00:11:37.900 | Do all of that online at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:11:46.060 | Another thing that you can do at the homepage—and I don't mention this very often, but there's
00:11:49.180 | a really interesting feature that we've built into the homepage for you.
00:11:54.180 | At the homepage, if you go there to DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn, you can browse the archive of episodes
00:12:01.240 | either by date, getting the latest episodes first, and that's the default.
00:12:04.580 | If you go to that page, you'll see a button that says "Recent."
00:12:07.580 | That's been pressed automatically.
00:12:09.340 | But you can toggle that button to a list called "Popular."
00:12:12.980 | You can click on the Popular button to see a real-time list of our episodes that have
00:12:16.980 | garnered the most plays all time.
00:12:20.660 | And that list—and you can scroll down and you can keep unfurling it—as many episodes
00:12:26.060 | as you want, the top 100, top 1,000 episodes, whatever you want.
00:12:29.980 | That list remains current every single day.
00:12:32.300 | So it's a really cool feature if you want to see our hit list, so to speak.
00:12:36.060 | Again, that's all available at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.
00:12:41.020 | I am not sure what's on the table for Monday's episode, but there will be an episode, Lord
00:12:45.740 | willing.
00:12:46.740 | I'm Tony Reinke, and we plan to see you on Monday.
00:12:49.820 | Until then, have a wonderful weekend.
00:12:51.460 | [END]
00:12:52.460 | DesiringGod.org
00:12:52.460 | Page 1 of 10
00:12:54.460 | DesiringGod.org
00:12:55.460 | Page 1 of 10
00:12:56.460 | DesiringGod.org
00:12:56.460 | [BLANK_AUDIO]