1 Timothy 6

A different doctrine is measured against the sound (healthful) words of the Lord Jesus and to the doctrine which is according to godliness. Sound words have no taint that encourages sin; they train piety. Novelty that will not consent to Christ's words is already a departure.

Grace offers a gospel that produces holiness. Teachers remain responsible to stay with Jesus' words. Wesley: if any teach otherwise than strict practical holiness in all its branches, they have left healthful doctrine.

Calvin: Paul condemns even those who do not openly oppose sound doctrine yet corrupt it by vain babbling. Words are sound because they give health. Doctrine according to godliness must instruct in the fear of God, edify faith, and train patience, humility, and love.

Whoever does not strive to teach usefully does not teach as he ought. Brilliance without profit is neither godly nor sound. The test is Christ's words and a teaching that actually forms piety.

The mark of the false teacher is swelling pride that understands nothing as it ought. An unhealthy craving for controversy and word-fights yields envy, dissension, slander, and evil suspicions. Dispute becomes a disease when practice is forgotten.

Wesleyan Arminians see a warning the church must obey: grace enables humility, but conceit can be indulged. Love of argument is not love of truth. Fruit exposes the tree.

Calvin: such persons are charged with foolish, empty pride. All they delight in proves their ignorance; they are swollen with subtleties and have nothing solid, mere wind. Questions that only sharpen worthless disputes beget envy and brawling.

Remain steadfast in the simplicity of the gospel. Ambition is the mother of envy. The church is not required to treat windy ostentation as depth.

Constant friction belongs with a mind already depraved and destitute of the truth. The fantasy is that godliness is a tool for profit: religion as a trade. Wesley: thinking the best religion is the getting of money, a far more common case than is usually supposed.

Arminian refusal of a prosperity gospel: grace is not a ladder to wealth. The sincere offer of Christ trains contentment and holiness, not a scheme to monetize piety. The call is to withdraw from that way of thinking.

Calvin: they measure the whole of Christianity by gain, as if the oracles of the Spirit were recorded to serve covetousness. They traffic in godliness as merchandise. Such society is infectious even when it still wears a Christian name.

Sacrilege is using piety for pay. Godliness is not a means of gain; treating it so already signals a mind deprived of the truth. The servants of Christ should make the distance plain.

Paul turns the slogan inside out. Godliness with contentment is great gain: unspeakable profit in time and eternity. Contentment is the companion of true, vital religion, not a consolation prize for those who failed to get rich.

Assisting grace can form a satisfied heart, and the heart must not refuse that gift. Gain is Christlike piety plus enough, not piety plus a bigger barn.

Calvin's irony: they make merchandise as if godliness were gain; yet rightly estimated, godliness is great and abundant gain, because it brings full blessedness and the enjoyment of Christ and all His riches.

Comfort: true happiness consists in piety. The Lord is present with His people and, as far as necessity requires, bestows from His fullness. Contentment is not stoicism; it is receiving Christ as wealth.

Birth and death fence greed. We brought nothing in; we take nothing out. Heaping is folly if the exit is empty-handed. Wesley: to what purpose, then, do we heap together so many things?

Grace teaches a pilgrim heart. Desire can still outrun need; the verse calls for a responsible, enabled contentment that remembers the grave.

Calvin: covetousness is an insatiable gulf if it is not restrained. The best bridle is to desire nothing more than this life demands. We imagine a thousand lives, and so we transgress the bound.

Everyone admits this sentence, then swallows the world with wishes. God sets the limit; the heart must be regulated to what supports life, not to fantasy estates.

Food and covering: a modest floor, not a prosperity ceiling. With these we will be content. Wesley read covering as raiment and a house, all a Christian needs and all religion allows him to desire as necessity.

Grace can wean the appetite. Contentment here is chosen under God's help, not a law against grateful enjoyment of further gifts, but a refusal to make extras into a right.

Calvin: food and raiment exclude luxuries and overflowing abundance; nature is content with a little, and what goes beyond natural use is superfluous. Using more is not condemned on its own account; lusting after more is always sinful.

Providence may give more than bread, and thanksgiving is due. The sin is the craving that will not say enough. Contentment is a learned grace, not a tax on every comfort.

The danger is the desire to be rich, not a bank balance by itself. Desire banishes contentment and opens a sad gradation: temptation, snare, foolish and hurtful desires, then ruin and destruction. Wesley: farewell all hope of content.

Grace can check greed, and greed can still be indulged until it drowns a soul. This is not a sneer at the poor who need wages; it is a pastoral alarm against a will set on wealth.

Calvin: the cause of the evils is not riches but an eager desire of them, even in a poor man. Every man who has resolved to become rich gives himself up as a captive to the devil. Foolish, even mad, desires at length plunge them into perdition.

Reformed sharpness, especially for ministers: when gold dazzles, they stick at nothing. The snare is spiritual before it is financial. God names ruin so that His people will flee the desire, not merely manage it.

Not money, but the love of money, is a root of every kind of evil. Through this craving some have wandered from the faith in their greed, and have pierced themselves. Wesley: they missed the mark; they aimed not at faith but at something else, and a guilty conscience with tormenting passions followed.

Wandering is spoken of as a departure. Grace that began a profession does not make greed harmless. The pangs are self-inflicted; flee the craving while mercy still calls.

Calvin: Paul does not squeeze every vice under avarice, but means that innumerable evils arise from it: frauds, perjury, cruelty, hatred, almost every sort of crime. The most aggravated evil is revolting from the faith; those diseased with this illness degenerate until they renounce it, and frightful torments of conscience follow.

Reformed reading of the wanderers: some who seemed in the way prove, by a final swerve, that the faith they named was not the faith God keeps. The warning is still a means; the elect are preserved, and the craving remains a snare to be fled.