When monitoring the outside influences in your life, it’s easy to concentrate so much on things like entertainment and secular activities that we forget one of the most common avenues Satan uses to trip us up comes from within the church. When I was growing up, the list of preachers with world-wide recognition was short. It began and ended with Billy Graham. There were traveling evangelists that were well known in certain regions and countries, but on a global scale, there wasn’t a long list.
Today, we have a phenomenon known as the celebrity pastor. These are pastors of large churches who have leveraged social media, the internet, and books to build a platform for themselves. Notice the platform they are building is amplifying their name, and that doesn’t always translate into glorifying God’s name. The result is we now have many preachers who are world famous.
There is a temptation among believers, the more immature in particular, to assume a preacher with a large following must be proclaiming truth because of how their ministry is growing. God wouldn’t multiply the success of someone not devoted to Him, right? They disregard the fact that Satan also has the power to bring apparent success to groups and individuals. The number of followers is a poor gauge of how true someone is holding to the gospel. Not all popular outside influences should make it past the guard we have set upon our hearts (Proverbs 4:23).
It’s easy to fall prey to outside influence when their message resonates with what we believe or wish to be true. Many are popular because they play to an image of God people find more palatable than the God they find in the Bible. They want a God who is only love and never exhibits wrath or judgment. They want a God whose sense of justice matches their own ideals. But a God created in an image of our making is no God at all. It is, in fact, an idol (Exodus 20:3-5).
In his letter to the Church in Rome, Paul implores the readers to, “Watch out for those who cause dissensions and pitfalls contrary to the doctrine you have learned. Avoid them” (Romans 16:17). In John’s first epistle, we find him repeating the same warning multiple times (1 John 2:18-19; 1 John 3:7-10; 1 John 4:1). When Paul was leaving instructions for Timothy, he told him a time will come when people would no longer tolerate sound doctrine but would accumulate teachers who said what they wanted to hear (2 Timothy 4:3). That time has now come.
We gravitate to outside influences who make us feel better about ourselves, make us think the Bible is about us rather than God, and whose teaching allows us to coexist in peace with the culture. We want easy, and there are plenty of preachers spooning it out. The Word of God says the world will hate us (John 15:18-19), will persecute us (2 Timothy 3:12), and revile us (Matthew 5:11). There’s nothing about the Christian life that aligns with culture (James 4:4), and we should run away from anyone teaching otherwise.
It’s embarrassing to look back and see how many times I was listening to people preaching a false gospel. It’s only by the grace of God and the leading of His Holy Spirit that I saw that teaching for what it was. What I was listening to was no gospel at all (Galatians 1:6-9). Be mindful of all outside influences, in particular those that come from within the church. Satan is a prowling lion, always looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). Test every teaching against the truth of God’s Word (Acts 17:11). Never accept something because of how popular the speaker is or how wonderful it sounds. Read God’s Word, study God’s Word, and live God’s Word. That will keep you from falling prey to the nefarious people who attempt to lead you astray.