Podcast: Godliness

0 · Oswald frames the podcast as supplemental teaching for community group discussion, establishes the topic (godliness), and introduces the controlling idea that godliness is fundamentally imitative and therefore requires a clear, accurate object

Foreign. Welcome to the Providence Podcast. My name is Chris Oswald, senior pastor at Providence Community Church. So glad that you're with us today. Want to shout out to 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 First Timothy Chapter three. 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. 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, you know, in clear view.

1 · Oswald uses manliness as an analogy for godliness, demonstrating how sincere imitation of a broken archetype (e

Let me give you an example of where imitation can go wrong. So godliness, let's use 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, you know, 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, is that if a young boy who has sort of a built in, 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, you know, 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 I don't love the phrase toxic masculinity, mostly because it always seems to lead and 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.

2 · Oswald asserts the core theological problem: a distorted view of God produces distorted godliness

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. 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, but they're being led astray in that direction, which is an ascetic direction, because they've got the wrong view of God. Now when I say the word ascetic, I feel like I have to hit pause for a minute and define my term. I don't know if I'm right about this, but it feels like the first big word that every 20 something these days learns is aesthetic. A S, T, H, right aesthetic, which means beautiful. Ascetic means like plain nothingness and so on and so forth. So I'm saying that in First Timothy 4 some people aspire to a version of Godliness that is broken because they've got the wrong view of God. They see him as a prude. And because they see him as A prude. They see him actually as a being who looks down upon the material world, who sees the material world as less than. And because of that view of God, they aspire to a form of godliness that is itself broken. And that form of godliness that's broken shows up in abstaining from foods that they shouldn't be abstaining from, and abstaining even from the joy of marriage, which they should not be abstaining from.

3 · Oswald acknowledges recording conditions and apologizes for background noise, briefly breaking the teaching frame to address the audience directly and personally

Pardon the background noise, but I'm on a time crunch to get this podcast done. And my wife is also on a time crunch to get a few things done that she needs to get done. So we're sharing the same space, we share the same office. And so you may hear some cute little sneezes, she's starting to come down with something, or the printer or so on and so forth. I apologize for that. But it is what it is.

4 · Oswald catalogs examples of distorted God-views and their corresponding godliness distortions (prudish God → asceticism; passive God → laxity), then assigns the community group the task of identifying additional false views of God and tracing their practical consequences

So when you have the wrong view of God, you get the wrong form of godliness and it always winds up being in many respects untenable. So you start with the wrong view of God, you get the wrong kind of godliness. Now, what are some wrong views of God that can lead us to wrong pursuits, wrong definitions of godliness? This is what I want to encourage you to discuss in your community groups. I want you to talk about the number, the wrong views of God that a person can have and how those lead to sort of a wrong kind of definition of what godliness is. And I gave you one, and that is the prudish God, the God who looks down on materiality. That vision of God will lead to an ascetic life, a life that is unnecessarily spare and bare, overly spiritualized under emphasizing practicality and means and so on and so forth. So that's one way, that's one false view of God. Well, there's another one. And I think you're going to. I think you're going to come up with a bunch if you, if you start to think about it. But another wrong view of God would be a passive God, a passive God who simply, you know, doesn't really care too much about what we do, and so on and so forth. And so in that respect, if that's your view of God, then godliness will have some kind of passivity, particularly probably toward holiness, a lax attitude toward holiness, or so on and so forth. So that's what we're dealing with. That's one of the main concepts we're dealing with. Now I'd like you to discuss how it's possible, because it is, to sort of have a broken view of God inform your pursuit of Godliness and how that can really gum up the works and so on and so forth. So what views of God do you have or have you had that are or were incorrect and thus inspired imitation of the wrong views and thus kind of created false godliness? I guess you could say so.

5 · Oswald redefines conscience as a reflective mechanism, not a truth-finder

One other thing I wanted to add to that is the role of the conscience, which is something that comes up a lot in one Timothy, and we've attempted to discuss it to some extent, but I wanted you to think about how the conscience is not a truth finding device as much as it is just sort of using the data you feed it and then telling you whether or not you're aligned with what that data is. For instance, if you have the wrong view of God and that wrong view is compelling, and like you really believe that this is who God is, your conscience is going to convict you when you fail to conform to what is actually an incorrect view of God. This is one of the things that I think the Bible means when it talks about an evil conscience or even a weak conscience. A conscience is simply reflecting on the view of God that you have. It isn't necessarily going to help you have a correct view of God. You have to get your correct view of God from the word of God and then let your conscience interact with the correct view of God.