godliness
Thesis Godliness requires an accurate vision of God, because we become like the God we worship, and a distorted view of God produces a distorted pursuit of godliness.
The shape of the argument
18 units across exposition, application, illustration, theological claim, and conclusion. The pastor's argument is built from these moving parts.
- The Wrong Model of Manliness cultural reference · unit #3 — Uses the analogy of manliness to demonstrate how sincere imitation produces broken outcomes when the object of imitation is flawed. Young men in minority urban contexts or influenced by figures like Andrew Tate imitate sincerely but end up embodying toxic forms of masculinity because they are copying broken models.
- The Passive God hypothetical · unit #10 — Provides a second example of a false view of God: the passive, unconcerned God, which produces moral laxity and a weak approach to holiness.
- The Corrupted Conscience of Huckleberry Finn cultural reference · unit #14 — The Huckleberry Finn passage dramatizes the sermon's central principle through narrative: Huck Finn's conscience convicts him for protecting Jim because his society has taught him a false moral theology (slavery is godly, helping slaves escape is sin). Despite doing the objectively right thing, Huck feels condemned because his conscience is calibrated to a broken vision of God and morality. The illustration vividly demonstrates how a wrong view of God produces a dysfunctional conscience.
- Godliness is fundamentally imitation, requiring an accurate and clearly visible object to imitate. unit #1
- If you don't have the right God in view, your pursuit of godliness will be broken and incorrect. unit #4
- A wrong view of God always produces a wrong and ultimately untenable form of godliness. unit #8
- The conscience enforces whatever view of God it is given rather than discerning truth independently, so a wrong view of God produces a dysfunctional conscience. unit #12
"toxic masculinity" — unnamed cultural commentators (unit #3)
"[Entire passage from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]" — Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) (unit #14)
Full transcript
0 · Oswald welcomes listeners, identifies the podcast's purpose (unpacking the previous Sunday's sermon on godliness from 1 Timothy 3), and frames the discussion as preparation for upcoming community group meetings
Hello, hello, hello! Welcome to the Providence Podcast. My name is Chris Oswald, senior pastor at Providence Community Church. So glad that you're with us today. I want to shout out to those, uh, those— that small number of people who are listening to this podcast now on a semi-regular basis that aren't members of Providence Community Church but are scattered throughout the Fruited Plain. Hello to y'all, so thankful that you're listening. This podcast is going to deal with a little bit of the unpacking of our discussion of godliness that occurred last Sunday, preaching from the end of 1 Timothy chapter 3. So we're going to talk about godliness today, and this is sort of to set up our community groups that we'll be meeting this week. Our community groups meet twice a month, and they gather to discuss the sermon in a loose sense, themes in the sermon, texts that were used in the sermon, and so on and so forth, and gather together to care for each other and to stir one another up to faith and good deeds. And so we're going to talk about godliness today, and what I want to talk about in particular is the imitative aspect of godliness.
1 · Establishes the sermon's controlling proposition: godliness is fundamentally imitative, which requires the object of imitation (God) to be both accurate and clearly visible
Godliness is imitation. Fundamentally, godliness is imitation. And that means that the object, it must be in clear view. The thing you're imitating must be in clear view. It must be accurate and it must be in clear view.
2 · Signals the shift from abstract principle to concrete illustration
Let me give you an example of where imitation can go wrong.
3 · Uses the analogy of manliness to demonstrate how sincere imitation produces broken outcomes when the object of imitation is flawed
So godliness, let's use another less, another term similar, that is manliness. So manliness would be the imitation of what I would say is something like the ideal archetype of a man. So in order to aspire to manliness, you have to have some sense of the ideal archetype of what a man is. And I've done maybe more than most suburban pastors have in terms of time in urban contexts, time in minority communities, and so on and so forth. And this problem of the imitative necessity associated with manliness is really comes into play here. So what I mean is that if a young boy who has sort of a built-in desire to imitate manliness, if he looks around and he sees men who are not good men, but that's what he has, that's the ideal archetype of manliness in his particular culture and context, and he goes to imitate what he sees, well, we've got a problem because what he's looking at isn't a good man. He's imitating a bad man. He doesn't know that. He's just trying to engage in manliness, which is an imitative process dependent on an object and seeing that object and so forth. So if your object is off, then what you're going to get, even in the sincerest of imitation, is going to be off as well. And, you know, I don't love the phrase toxic masculinity because mostly because it always seems to lead in— it only seems to be one-sided. The toxic masculinity always seems to be on the hard side, and no one ever talks about toxic masculinity on the bookish side, on the soft side, and so on and so forth. But there's all forms of there's all sorts of forms of toxic masculinity. And what's really going on there is that people have identified an ideal archetype of man, of manliness, and then aspired to be that, but they've picked the wrong man to imitate. And so you've got people like Andrew Tate who are stepping into the void, who is a broken man. He's a broken man. And And yet many men are scrambling, or many young men are scrambling, looking for an example to imitate. They want to be manly and they're like, "Well, where's the ideal archetype of man?" They land on Andrew Tate. And so they sincerely go about imitating the wrong thing.
4 · Applies the manliness analogy directly to godliness: a wrong view of God inevitably produces a wrong pursuit of godliness, no matter how sincere the effort
This is probably, well, not probably, this is the central problem. Associated with godliness. If you don't have the right God in view, the thing you aspire to will be broken. It will be incorrect.
5 · Previews the upcoming Sunday sermon on 1 Timothy 4 and introduces the example of false godliness addressed in that passage
We're going to this Sunday look at 1 Timothy chapter 4, and in 1 Timothy chapter 4, I won't ruin it all for you, but in 1 Timothy 4, we've got a situation where some people are being led astray into a form of godliness that is not godly.
Recent preaching context
The three sermons immediately preceding this one in the preaching schedule.
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