The Great Physician

Good morning, I’m Nate Gustafson, the Location Pastor for our upcoming third Renovation Church location. Before we jump into the message today, I want to introduce to you Elizabeth Lord. Elizabeth has been a member of Renovation Church for a number of years, and she is now following God's call to uproot her life here in MN to become a full-time global missionary.

I want to invite Elizabeth to share a little about what God has called her to do:

"Thank you! I’m heading to Papua New Guinea with Wycliffe Bible Translators. Their vision is that people from every language can understand the Bible and be transformed by it. My role will be to come alongside translation teams and local communities, helping them apply Scripture in practical ways to their daily lives. Thank you so much for your support—I’m truly grateful!"

Amen. As a church, we want to send Elizabeth out with prayer and support. Leaving home and stepping into full-time missions is not easy, and as her church, we are committed to praying for her and standing with her.

As I pray, I’d invite you, if you feel comfortable, to extend a hand toward Elizabeth. This is a way for us, to show our support in prayer as she is sent out to do God's work.

(PRAYER) ~1 minute

Amen. Thank you, Elizabeth. If you’d like to connect with her after the service, she has a table set up in the lobby where she would love the opportunity to meet you and share more about what she will be doing in Papua New Guinea.

MESSAGE:

So, does anyone here actually like going to the doctor? Nobody does, right? It usually means you're sick, in pain, or about to be told a bunch of things to change to be healthy. And then there are needles.

I have a family member who hates needles so much that, at sixteen, when a doctor tried to do a blood draw, they ran into the lobby, death-gripped a coat rack, and screamed, 'I am NOT going back in there!'

But we keep going to the doctor because they save our lives and we know a little pain now brings healing later.

Today, God acts as our spiritual doctor, diagnosing what makes our lives and world so sick, showing us how to build our spiritual immune system.

Please open your Bible or grab the one at your chair and turn to 2 Timothy 3, its on page 814. When you get there, find the Big number 3. The Bible is packed full of the brilliance of God to guide our daily lives, so each week, we open the Bible together to dig in.

For context, the Apostle Paul is writing this from a Roman prison cell, waiting to be executed for preaching about Jesus. He’s passing the baton to his young protégé, Timothy, who is pastoring in Ephesus—a culturally chaotic city a lot like modern-day L.A.

Paul gives Timothy a strong warning about the moral decline and false teachings undermining our world. Through Paul, God provides us with the diagnosis needed to seek His power for healing, transformation, and the strength to resist destructive worldly influences.

2 Timothy 3:1 - But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days.

Paul begins by setting the stage, describing the terrible, fierce, and dangerous times we continue to face in the last days. Often, when we think of the last days, we imagine a short period of time before a Hollywood-style apocalypse that ends the world.

But biblically, the 'last days' aren't a short countdown. They actually started 2,000 years ago when Jesus arrived and the Holy Spirit was poured out in Acts 2, and they continue until Jesus returns.

Looking at the news, it’s easy to think Jesus is coming back by Tuesday. But here’s the reality: every generation for two millennia has felt exactly like that.

Paul isn’t handing Timothy a wall calendar to circle the date of the end; he’s giving us a wake-up call. When we understand the challenges we’re up against, we can actually be ready for them.

In the last, turbulent, days, its essential to

Find your peace in Christ, not in your circumstances.

Too often we play the 'Someday' game. We think, 'I’ll finally have peace once the kids are out of diapers... once I get that job... once that person finally apologizes.' We’re trying to find peace in a world thats constantly shifting.

Paul is being honest: there will always be chaos. You can’t anchor your soul to a storm. You have to anchor it to what’s certain: Jesus’ forgiveness, the absolute security of God’s love, walking in the ways and the power of God.

So, as we wait for Jesus return, Find your peace in Christ, not in your circumstances.

So, with that as a backdrop, Paul gives God’s diagnosis of what is causing the terrible times. He lists 19 things, and I think you’ll find as I did that it is very convicting.

2 Timothy 3:2-4 - People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God

That’s quite a list: 19 things pulling our world apart. Boastful, proud, abusive, no self-control—sounds like our social media comment section!

God is our Great Physician, diagnosing the problem so He can heal us. Convicting us so can change. But will we listen to him?

Unfortunately, our culture treats God’s conviction like an attack, so often we get offended and tune out.

It reminds me of my family member, with the death grip on the waiting room coat rack. They were so scared that the little kids watching in the lobby started crying like, 'If the teenagers are this scared of the doctor, we’re doomed!'

We laugh, but we do the same thing with God. We treat His truth like a threat instead of a cure.

Don’t buy that lie. The only way to get well is to trust God to lead us to healing.

When you go to the doctor, they examine your symptoms to determine the underlying cause of the disease. So, Paul starts with the underlying cause tearing our world apart…

The Diagnosis: People will be lovers of themselves.

Our world constantly tells you to center everything on you. We call this

(This definition should come up below “the diagnosis” on the same slide) Expressive individualism – The lie that your internal desires and feelings are the highest authority.

Instead of looking to God, we’re told to look inward. You define your own reality; you find your own truth.

You see this everywhere, from Supreme Court rulings to Disney. Think about Elsa in Frozen (put up her picture). My kids sang “Let it Go” 10 billion times—anyone else suffer through that? She sings,

(Below the picture, put up the lyrics WHEN I start to read them) 'No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I’m free.' That is the anthem of expressive individualism. It says, I define life based on my feelings, and everyone else has to conform to my truth.

In the movie, it creates an eternal winter. In real life, Paul warns it burns society to the ground. When we make ourselves the center, everything falls into chaos.. .

Because when we live by our impulses and feelings, we are so unstable. Our feelings change constantly, and sometimes we have conflicting desires at the same time. Like, I want 6 pack abs and to eat 25 chocolate chips cookies every night, these are conflicting desires…

What is important to see is that when we ditch God’s truth—the only consistent anchor we have—we don’t find freedom. We actually become slaves to our own appetites.

(Go back to The Diagnosis Slide) As Paul says later in the list, we lose self-control, which leads to the addiction running rampant in our world:

Like, look at our phones. The average American is now spending over 5 hours a day staring at a screen. Over a lifetime that adds up to 16 ½ years!

None of us wake up wanting to doom-scroll for hours, ignore our families, and fuel our anxiety. But when our impulses grab the steering wheel, our self-control gets crushed, and our peace crashes right along with it.

So, the love of self, the narcissism our world encourages, leads to all kinds of other issues.

Let's look at verses 2-4 again. I’m going to briefly explain each word. As I read, prayerfully ask God to show you any of these you are struggling with. You can’t heal what you won’t name, so let the Great Physician diagnose your sickness today so he can heal you.

As you listen, write it down any that stand out, so later you can seek God’s power and wisdom to change it.

Here we go:

lovers of money – is being consumed with the pursuit of riches and greed, often at the cost of others

Boastful, proud, and conceited – is thinking and talking highly of yourself and looking down on others

abusive – is using words as a weapon to destroy others' reputations or cause emotional harm

disobedient to their parents – is having a rebellious spirit toward authority

ungrateful – is assuming we have a right to the things we get, even though the very breath we just took is a gift…

Unholy – is loving what is wrong and participating in it

without love – is being unable to sympathize or empathize with others.

Unforgiving - is lacking the desire to make peace

slanderous – is distorting what others say and do, intentionally twisting it or tearing down others' reputations to elevate oneself.

brutal – is dead to tenderness

not lovers of the good – is despising what God says is good, true, and beautiful, instead loving what is raunchy, demeaning, and destructive

Treacherous – is breaking promises for their own advantage

rash – is being reckless and impulsive in words and actions, ignoring wisdom and accountability

Lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God – is living for comfort, self-indulgence, and happiness rather than for God. You know you are a lover of pleasure rather than of God when you follow Jesus until you don’t get what you want, or when he asks you to do something hard, and then you walk away.

Ooof…anyone else feeling convicted? As we go through that list, we know how destructive those things are to us and to our community.

Yet too often we just get discouraged when our struggles are laid out so we live in denial or just feel hopeless to change. The key is to see that God is lovingly diagnosing our sin so we can actually heal and then thrive.

God, as a good doctor, is calling out what is causing our sickness, giving us the opportunity to pray for forgiveness and to seek healing by asking God to transform us!

To repent, to change our thought patterns and actions.

So, as I read, what sinful patterns have you fallen into that you need to change?

God has been convicting me of my lack of self-control at night. After busy days of work and parenting, I know I should turn everything off, read, pray, and sleep to wake refreshed.

But I often stay up late watching shows, eating dessert, and believing the lie that it doesn’t matter or that I don’t care, even though the next day I feel blah and mad at myself.

Can anyone relate?

When God convicts me, I have experienced His healing power by sharing my struggles with other Christians who pray for me, encourage me, and hold me accountable to change.

Then, transforming my mind by praying consistently, “God, lead me to care deeply, to choose to be healthy, and to get good rest. God, I hate staying up late, eating unhealthy, and making myself tired. I love getting good sleep, ending my day with You and Your wisdom, and waking up rested to serve.”

Trust me, that kind of active prayer will heal you!!

Interestingly, with society completely breaking down into this self-obsessed behavior, you would assume the world would move away from religion.

But Paul introduces a plot twist that we must understand.

2 Timothy 3:5-7 - having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people. They are the kind who worm their way into homes and gain control over gullible women, who are loaded down with sins and are swayed by all kinds of evil desires, always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth.

In the midst of these terrible days, many will turn to a hollow religion, what we could call a

The Counterfeit Cure: Deceptive, empty religion that denies God’s truth and power

Today, we see this through the postmodern spirituality where we use God for personal gain. Where Religion becomes an accessory, or a show.

We see this all the time right now in politics, where someone will pray at an event or say they are a Christian, but then their actions are actually the opposite of what Jesus would do.

As Paul says, in verse 5, this is a form of godliness that denies God’s power to transform us. It's where we gladly receive God’s power to save, love, forgive, and bring us to heaven. Yet when God leads us to sacrifice, change, show humility, or forgive others,

We are like NAH, like following Jesus is optional, denying God’s power to lead our lives and conquer our sin.

So many of embraced this empty religion that says you can believe anything, endorse anything, live any way you choose as long as it makes you happy, because Jesus just wants you to be happy.

Often in Christianity, it will be accompanied by saying something like, “We don’t need to be bound by the outdated rules of the Bible. Those were written 2,000 years ago and don’t apply to us today.”

In verse 6, Paul warns that these false teachers 'worm their way into homes' to control the vulnerable—which he identifies here as women.

Let’s hit pause, because to a modern ear, that sounds offensive. But in the first century, women were systematically denied education and structurally isolated. Often, Greek women couldn’t even speak in public without risking severe social penalties. They were simply the most vulnerable demographic.

Early Christianity actually elevated women, demanding they be educated in theology so they could spot manipulation.

Today, we need this warning more than ever.

If the ancient method of infiltration was a false teacher creeping into a physical home, the modern equivalent is the algorithm.

Our smartphones have become infiltration phones, they literally creep into our homes, our kids' bedrooms, when our defenses are down, spoon-feeding us anger, anxiety, distraction, despair, and destruction.

It is really interesting that we are so careful about who comes into our homes, who plays with our kids, yet we do so little to filter what we see and hear on our devices.

What is sinister is often what we see online is disguised as something good that leads us into evil.

For instance, think about how easily outrage over real evil morphs into a self-righteous hatred. We see a post from someone that we disagree with, and suddenly we feel justified in dehumanizing them and attacking them with our words—completely forgetting that Jesus commands us to love our enemies, because He created them in His image.

But it goes even deeper, In verse 7 Pauls’ last line says , always learning but never able to come to a knowledge of the truth

Wow, that is us! We are constantly skimming from idea to idea, reel to reel, learning but never really thinking deeply about anything. We Know more information than anyone before in the history of the world.

Yet, we aren’t getting better because we lack the godly wisdom to discern and filter the constant information.

Sadly, the constant need for more information has influenced how we follow Jesus, making it seem like discipleship is just knowing more information.

Like today, it may be tempting to say, okay, so God says not to be abusive, got it, that one was easy.

But Jesus doesn't just want to inform us; He wants to transform us. We arrive at the truth by allowing God to change our thoughts, attitudes, and actions.

So, we must slow down to ask in prayer, God show me where I am abusive, where I am using my words to attack, to intentionally harm others.

Then, as he reveals, we ask for forgiveness from God and those we hurt and in God’s power we transform.

Paul leads us to the reality that

The True Cure: Submit to God’s power by obeying His truth that leads to transformation

We need what the theologian Francis Schaeffer called 'True Truth.' That's the idea that there is an objective reality that comes from Jesus and exists entirely outside our personal feelings, perspectives, or inner desires.

This idea of "True Truth" is essential in daily life. For instance, if you hand a bank teller a $100 bill. You don’t want them to say, 'I just feel like this $100 is fake.' No, you want objective reality, it is $100.

But how do tellers spot a fake? They don’t study thousands of counterfeits. They spend all their time studying the real thing. They know the real $100 bill so well that a fake instantly stands out.

That’s what we need to do with God’s Word. We need to study it to know what is true, right, and wrong, revealed perfectly in Jesus.

Then we submit to God by obeying Jesus ways in His power, regardless of our feelings.

One of the things we MUST do, even though it is hard, is be intentional about cutting out the negative influences that pull us away from God’s truth.

When we don’t, we are just floating in a sea of algorithms designed to hijack your brain and feed our impulses. Deadening us to the call from God to do the hard work of actually surrendering our lives and changing direction.

ENTERTAINING OURSELVES TO DEATH…

Which is exactly why in verse 5, Paul drops a heavy line: 'Have nothing to do with such people.'

Now, this could be really confusing, because it seems like Paul is telling us to cut people off completely who lead us astray. Yet, in Chapter 2, He tells Timothy to challenge false teachers with God’s truth, and in Chapter 4, to reach out to the lost as an evangelist. So, what does he mean?

Paul is specifically saying to have nothing to do with leaders in the church who put on the mask of godliness, but refuse to change of their sinful patterns, and actually say their sin is good. In those cases, we lovingly draw a boundary. We don’t let them lead us, and we don't let their values shape our church. But we extend the invitation to return if they will work to change.

On a deeper level, Paul urges us to never feel 'at home' in the world's sin. It's easy to become comfortable with sin, especially as media mass-markets it to us, filling our minds with toxic content.

Many of us choose to inhale media toxins daily and then act surprised when our hearts grow sick. Stop inhaling poison.

God, our Great Physician, says we MUST be careful about what we think and consume. If what you see or hear makes you anxious, angry, or numb, cut it out.

Instead, we must immerse our thoughts in His goodness and truth, so we live differently!

Honestly, when you stack all of this up—the terrible times, the deep-rooted narcissism, the hollow religious masks, and the manipulative algorithms creeping into our living rooms—it feels overwhelming.

But Paul offers us hope in the chaos in

2 Timothy 3:8-9 - Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so also these teachers oppose the truth. They are men of depraved minds, who, as far as the faith is concerned, are rejected. But they will not get very far because, as in the case of those men, their folly will be clear to everyone.

Paul references Moses in Exodus, where he confronts Pharaoh and two magicians, Jannes and Jambres. Jewish tradition says these men used demonic power to mimic God's miracles, fooling Pharaoh.

They could match Moses temporarily, but God’s power eventually overwhelmed them, revealing their folly.

In our lives today, we can discern someone’s folly, by looking at the fruit of their life or teaching. Are they leading others into the sin patterns of our world, or are they leading others to produce the Fruit of the Spirit—things like love, joy, peace, patience, and self-control?

The good news is, Evil has an expiration date. If we trust in God’s wisdom, He will expose the lies. His reality—the 'True Truth'—will stand firm.

One clear example is in 1776, the influential French philosopher Voltaire boldly predicted that within 100 years, the Bible would be a forgotten relic of history.

He believed the intellectual superiority of the Enlightenment would completely erase it. But decades after he died, his own house was sold and used to print Bibles!

Since his prediction, an estimated 5 billion Bibles have been distributed worldwide. No matter how fierce the cultural winds get, God’s Word will stand forever!"

So, where does this all lead us?

This passage is an urgent call to evaluate your actions and daily thoughts. Examine your media, cultural heroes, and ideas entering your mind through devices.

With other Christians, submit to God’s power, ask Him to reveal sinful patterns and lies, and, in His strength, remove them.

As Jesus heals us, we can step out into a dark world with hope, helping others experience healing and life with Jesus for eternity!

Lets pray…