Godliness Matters

1 Timothy 4:6-9. Please stand as we read God's word together. This is God's word. It's eternally true. "In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following. But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. It is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Please be seated.

J. I. Packer wrote this. He said, "The way to be truly happy is to be truly human, and the way to be truly human is to be truly godly." We'll come back to this passage in 1 Timothy later, but I want you to see today that godliness matters. Godliness matters. Godliness is at the heart of everything that is good.

But what is godliness? What is it? We tend to have fuzzy ideas about what godliness even is, okay? And if we're fuzzy about what godliness is, then our godliness will be fuzzy, and fuzzy godliness never helped anyone. So what is godliness?

First of all, godliness is not righteousness, okay? Godliness is not righteousness. It's easy to confuse godliness and righteousness. It's easy to smush them together as if they're just different words for the same thing. Okay? Of course, they're intimately related, but godliness is not the same thing as righteousness. Righteousness flows from godliness, but they're distinct. So how are godliness and righteousness different from one another?

Here's, here's what I would say. The biggest difference between godliness and righteousness is that godliness is primarily upward, while righteousness is primarily outward. Okay? What I mean is that godliness is oriented upward towards God, and righteousness is oriented outward to right living, towards relationships and doing justice with one another. And so godliness, here's some definitions, all right? Godliness is reverential feeling, piety, and devotion. These are, this comes from those who define Greek words, okay? So godliness, reverential feeling, piety and devotion; righteousness, as it's used in the New Testament, fair and equitable dealing, justice, integrity, virtue.

So you see that? It's not just, uh, that it's not so much that godliness is only on the inside, while righteousness is only on the outside. Both godliness and righteousness overlap in the heart, in the inner man. And both godliness and righteousness can be faked. They can both be faked. We can appear godly, and we can appear righteous, but not be godly or righteous. The Apostle Paul warns us in 2 Timothy 3:5, he warns of people in the church who hold to a form of godliness, although they have denied its what? Its power.

We all know about the Pharisees, right, in the Gospels, who had the appearance of righteousness, the outward appearance of right living, right actions, but in reality they were whitewashed tombs, nice and clean and shiny on the outside, right, but filled with dead men's bones and all uncleanness. So you can appear godly, you can appear righteous, but be a hypocrite. But this d- distinction remains. Godliness is mostly upward, our relationship to God. Righteousness is mostly outward, our relationship to other people.

Now, it's pretty easy to see this distinction in the Bible, all right? But I want to show you one place where this distinction is clear and helpful to us, and this is in Romans chapter 1. So turn in your Bible or look on the screen, hopefully it's there. Romans chapter 1. The interesting thing about Romans 1 is that we're going to learn about godliness and righteousness by seeing what the Apostle Paul says about ungodliness and unrighteousness. All right?

So Romans 1, verses 18 to 32, listen to this. He says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.

"Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore, God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

"For this reason, God gave them over to degrading passions. For their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural, and in the same way also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman who, and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men, committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil, full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful. And although they know the ordinance of God that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them."

What an amazing passage. Uh, so filled with implications for us and for our, our day, right? Notice what he says in verse 18. "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." So Romans 1 helps us to define godliness by flipping godliness on its head. You see that? Okay, what is ungodliness? What are the ungodly like?

Romans 1 says this, even though the ungodly know God, there's a definite sense in which every man, woman, child born into the world, made in the image of God, knows God, okay? Even though they know God through his revelation and creation, they what? Well, they do not honor him as God or give thanks to him, verse 21. They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God for images, verse 23. They exchange the truth of God for a lie, and they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator, verse 25. They do not see fit to acknowledge God, verse 28. They hate God. Verse 30.

And at the culmination of this part of Romans, Romans 1, 2, and 3, Paul summarizes all of this ungodliness like this, right? Romans 3:18, "There is no fear of God before their eyes." Sums it all up. But this ungodliness leads to and overflows in what? Unrighteousness. The ungodly do unrighteous things.

Look at verses 24 and 25 in Romans 1. It says this, "Therefore," this is because of their ungodliness, "therefore, God gave them over in the lust of their hearts to impurity, so that their bodies would be dishonored among them. For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen." Do you see this? Ungodliness, ungodliness, the failure to worship and thank and honor and love God results in all kinds of unrighteousness, okay? All kinds of immoral and perverted and unjust attitudes and behavior.

Paul says in verse 26 that God gave up the ungodly to degrading passions. And it's perfectly obvious what he's talking about. He's talking about the degrading passions of homosexuality. That's what he says. Women with women and men with men committing indecent acts. He says in verse 28 that God gives up the ungodly to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper. And then he gives this long list of all kinds of unrighteous acts and attitudes, right? Everything from covetousness and envy and gossip and strife and deceit and slander and kids, disobedience to parents, okay? All the way to murder.

Where does all of that come from? Where does all that unrighteousness come from? It comes from a heart of ungodliness. And ungodliness is a failure to, to worship and fear and love God. That's what ungodliness is.

So what is godliness? Well, godliness is the opposite of ungodliness, right? The godly honor God and give thanks to him, not just with their lips. They love the glory of the incorruptible God. They cling to the truth of God and worship and serve the Creator rather than the creature. They acknowledge God as God. They love God. They fear God. That is godliness.

It's not about going through religious motions and jumping through religious hoops. It's about loving the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. It's about honoring him as he deserves, from the heart, not just with your lips. It's about humbling yourself before him, fearing him as your maker, as your king. It's about thanking him constantly for your life, no matter how hard it is, for your breath, for all of his overflowing kindness to you. It's about always living self-consciously before his gaze, right? Knowing and feeling his love for you and loving him back. That's what godliness is.

Godliness matters because godliness has the power to change you from the inside out. That's how real change happens, from the inside out. Godliness empowers a life of righteousness. It empowers and fuels a life of obedience to God in every area of life. How do you, how do you love your neighbor as yourself, right? How you love your family, how you love your enemies, how you do your work, how you act towards the weak and the needy, how you talk to your wife, how you talk to your husband, how you talk to your kids. It empowers all of your internal fighting against all of your sins and temptations. Godliness empowers you for all of that. Godliness empowers you. And so godliness matters.

Can you imagine trying your hardest to be righteous, right? That outward living. Can you imagine trying your hardest to be righteous in your relationships, in the details of your life, and in your fight against your sin, without giving attention to your godliness? This is our constant temptation because we want to look good. We think about only the outward life. That would be like trying to run a marathon and without eating for a week. Be like trying to start your car on empty. There's no fuel, there's no power. And I think that we Christians do this all the time. This is why Paul warns, remember, against those in the church who have the appearance of godliness but deny its power.

Godliness is power. We neglect it to our destruction. So how do we neglect godliness? Let me count the ways. We neglect godliness by starving our souls. We starve our souls by refusing to read and think about God's word. Trying to run a marathon without eating anything. We neglect godliness by gorging ourselves on filth and drivel, right? On the filth and drivel of the music and the media and the thought forms of our world that hates Jesus Christ.

We neglect godliness by being afraid of feelings. Remember the definition of godliness, remember? Reverential feeling, piety, devotion. Let me take a minute to talk to the young men among us, and I'm going to consider most of you young men, most of you men as young. All right? Our culture has lied to you, young men, about the most important things in the universe. You know this, right? You have bought the lies. We all have. You think that reverential feeling, piety, and devotion are for girls. Okay? Reverential feeling sounds gay. You know? Not cool, unmanly. You think that manliness equals stoicism, or worse yet, cynicism, or indifference to God.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Do you think King David was a pansy? Right? The one who killed his tens of thousands? And yet, David was a man after God's own heart. Read the Psalms. Read the Psalms. The Psalms are the epitome of reverential feeling, piety, and devotion to God. That's what they are. Where they're so helpful to us to read and to think about, to meditate on, and to sing.

If godliness is at the heart of righteousness, then godliness is at the heart of righteous manhood. You cannot have one without the other. Every voice that says you can be a good man without being godly is absolutely lying to you. All the unrighteous living that we saw in Romans 1 flows from ungodliness, and the truth is that ungodliness makes you gay. I mean, like, literally. Seriously. Ungodliness. What is ungodliness according to Romans 1? Ungodliness is the wor- the creature worshiping the creature. That's homo worship, you understand? Worship of the self, worship of the same. And homo worship leads to homo sex. That's what Paul said in Romans 1. For both men and women.

So if you think that godliness is for girls, men, then you are well on your way down the path to having a foolish, darkened heart that culminates in dishonoring your manhood and living a lie, a life of shameless acts. That's where it starts. It's the opposite of what the world wants you to think. That's what Romans 1 says. It all starts with neglecting, with despising, with mocking godliness. All right?

Now, all of this is true of you women too, don't worry. You young women are told by the liars of our culture that godliness will demean you, it'll belittle you, it'll turn you into a wallflower or a doormat, right? And that is a lie if ever there was one. Godliness will equip you to thrive as a righteous woman. You see this, that the devil wants to destroy you.

He wants to destroy your joy. And if he can convince you that the source of true and lasting joy is really the path of the ungodly, then you lose, you lose everything. Brothers and sisters, godliness matters because it's what, it's what you were made for. You were made to know and love and fear and honor and delight in God. That is what you're made for. Biblical Christianity is a religion of the heart.

It is heart religion. This means that your thoughts, your attitudes, your posture and feelings, feelings towards God matter. Your inner life matters. And you neglect that to your own hurt, both in this life and in the life to come. Here's another way we neglect godliness, okay? We neglect godliness by mocking it. So, an old historical word for godliness is piety. Piety. Piety is just the same as godliness, right?

It is a deep sense of reverence toward God of that overflows in a righteous life. Piety is godliness. But it's become very popular today, especially among people just like us in Reformed church circles. It's become very popular to mock piety. They don't mock piety directly. Instead, they mock pietism. Pietism. Now, pietism is a thing, okay? Pietism was a movement that began in Germany, like in the 1600s, as a reaction to a kind of dead orthodoxy among the Lutherans, all right?

Dead orthodoxy is what happens when you have all the right doctrine, all your ducks in a row, orthodox doctrine, right doctrine, but you hold it like in a formalistic, stiff, rigid, cold, purely intellectual way. That's dead orthodoxy. You have all the right facts what about what the Bible teaches, but it does not do anything to actually change your life. I'm telling you, this is a problem today as well.

And so pietism as a movement began in the 1600s as a reaction against dead orthodoxy, but a lot of good things came out of that pietist movement. We need to acknowledge this. An emphasis on heart religion as opposed to dead orthodoxy, that's a good thing. An emphasis on the fact that we must be born again, as Jesus says in John 3. An awareness that you can be like the Pharisees, right?

All the right doctrine, but spiritually dead. But there came to be a kind of pietism that I'm prepared to say is a bad thing. It's an interesting thing about the English language, right? You, when, when you can take a good thing and add "ism" to the end of it, right? And it very often, not always, very often becomes a bad thing. And that is the case with pietism.

Pietism often starts with a good thing, right? Piety, godliness, turns it into a bad thing by making it the only good thing. In other words, pietism is often an exaggerated and like narrow focus on personal inward devotion at the expense of doctrine and work and physical discipline and social engagement and intellectual rigor. Okay? It's only the inward life as opposed to all of that, at the exclusion of all of that.

Pietism can easily prune down the Christian life to what happens, like, in here, right? And it can lead us to think that what happens out there doesn't really matter, okay? I've known men and women who were raised as honest to goodness pietists, in the bad sense, okay? And they were taught that the only thing that matters is going to heaven when they die. And so they don't know how to do anything.

You know, they don't know how to relate to members of the opposite sex. Okay? They they don't know how to fix a flat. They don't know how to change a light bulb. Sometimes I'm not exaggerating. They don't have a plan for what they want to do with their lives, because all that matters is, am I going to go to heaven when I die? And this world doesn't matter at all.

So again, many today in the Reformed world rightly want to resist the unbiblical narrowness of pietism. Okay, you with me? But in the process, they end up mocking piety. And if you mock piety, you are hacking at the root of everything that's good, both inwardly and outwardly.

Now, lastly, how do we become godly? How do we become godly? We don't come into this world godly, right? Because of the sin of our first father, Adam, we come into this world ungodly. And all the, with all the twistedness that Paul describes in Romans 1, all the foolishness, all the perversion. And we cannot change ourselves from ungodly to godly. How can, can an ungodly man decide to be godly? In order to decide to be godly, you'd have to be godly. We can't do it.

This is the heart of what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. Romans 5:6: "For while we were still helpless, at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly," not just to take us to heaven when we die, but to make us godly. Titus 2 says this, excuse me, Titus 2:11-14 says, "For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny ungodliness." This is what the grace of God does for us. Teaches us to say no to "ungodliness and worldly desires, and to live sensibly, righteously, and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, who gave himself for us to redeem us from every lawless deed and to purify for himself a people for his own possession, zealous for good deed." That's what Christ was doing when he died for the ungodly, making that possible for all of his people.

So the first thing we need to become godly is to be born again by the power of the Holy Spirit. We must be born again. We need the free grace of God poured out on us in Christ Jesus. His grace trains us to deny ungodliness, to live godly lives. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness, Peter says. Now, there are two more things we need to be godly. Two more things. All right? We need diet, and we need discipline. Diet and discipline.

Godliness comes only to those who pursue it. And this is what the Apostle Paul told us back in the passage I read at the beginning, 1 Timothy 4:6-9. Look at this again. 1 Timothy 4:6-9. He says this, "In pointing out these things to the brethren, you will be a good servant of Christ Jesus, constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine which you have been following. But have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things. Since it holds promise for this present life and also for the life to come, it is a trustworthy statement deserving full acceptance."

So Paul tells Timothy, right, that if he puts these things before the brothers, he'll be a good servant of Jesus Christ. These things are the solid truths of Scripture, the truth of the of of the gospel and and what God has done. In order to be a good servant of Christ, as a pastor, Timothy must preach and teach God's word faithfully. That's what he's saying. And then Paul says, Timothy will be able to preach and teach faithfully because, look at what it says, he is being constantly nourished, "constantly nourished on the words of the faith and of the sound doctrine."

In other words, Paul is talking about the diet of godliness. What are you eating? What are you, what is nourishing you? To make gains in godliness, you must watch what you eat. Right? The only diet that promotes gains in godliness is the words of the faith and sound doctrine. And Paul says in verse 7, tells Timothy, "have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women."

He's warning us about feeding ourselves with content that generates endless argument, that diverts our attention from the gospel rather than nourishing our godliness. You are what you eat. What are you consuming? What are you consuming? Words of unbelief, rotten doctrine, old wives' tales? What are you nourishing yourself with? The constant stream of spiritual junk food? The music you listen to, the podcasts you listen to? Oh, there's a lot of spiritual junk out there.

We suck it in. The videos and the movies, the shows you watch, do you think none of this matters? That it has no negative effect? We all know, especially these days, that the junk we put in our bodies has a negative effect. Are you more concerned with the health of your body than with the health of your soul? So your diet matters, your diet matters, but so does your discipline.

Godliness is not a matter of let go and let God. Godliness does not just magically drift down to the passive. It does not come automatically. Clearly, it requires discipline. That's what he says. The discipline to seek God, to fear God, to grow in godliness, to cultivate this reverential feeling, piety, and devotion. That doesn't come naturally. You've got to cultivate it. It says in verses 8, verses 7 and 8, "Have nothing to do with worldly fables fit only for old women. On the other hand, discipline yourself for the purpose of godliness. For bodily discipline is only of little profit, but godliness is profitable for all things, since it holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come."

Discipline yourself for godliness. Discipline yourself is the word in Greek that basically means something like go to the gym, okay? Exercise yourself, train yourself. Now this passage is often used to discourage or discount bodily training and exercise, right? Right? That is not what he is doing. He's not saying it's wrong to work your body and train and discipline yourself physically. God gave you a body. He gave you a body to use in this life, in this world, for good. There's no spiritual superiority in neglecting your physical health and vitality. It's, it doesn't have to be either or, okay? You can't use your body for good if it's sick and weak because of your own neglect, your gluttony, your laziness, your lack of discipline.

Bodily training does have some value in this present life, but godliness holds promise for the present life and also for the life to come. Remember, godliness results in a righteous life. It's of great value, not just in the life to come, but also in this life. It's not either or. You should care about the usefulness of your body, because God gave it to you to use for him.

But if you prioritize training your body over training your godliness, you are a fool. Working for the thing you can't keep, neglecting the the one thing that you can never lose. Get gains, brothers and sisters, get gains in your godliness. Okay? Nourish yourself on the word of God. Discipline your outer man and your inner man. Cultivate strength of spirit. Strengthen your reverential feeling, piety, and devotion. This is not some moralistic, legalistic message to get you to earn anything from God.

That's not what I'm saying. This is a call to all of us to take God seriously, more seriously than anything, than anyone, to fear him, to love him, to humble ourselves before him, to call out to him, because there is great value in godliness. Godliness matters for this life and the life to come. May God help us.

Let's pray together. Father, would you please help us? We confess to you how often and how much we neglect our souls, focus on our bodies, and do all of that to our great harm and detriment. Would you please have mercy? We ask in Jesus' name, amen.