Even If i Walk Alone

Instructing and encouraging you to live your life as a disciple of Jesus

discernment

False Teachers

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Each of us bears the responsibility of sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ with everyone we meet (Matthew 28:19-20; Romans 10:14). Today, there is no shortage of voices claiming to speak the truth of God’s Word. On the surface, that is wonderful news. The more voices, the more the message spreads. The frightening truth is many of those voices are not teaching the gospel we find in scripture.

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For every faithful adherent to God’s Word, it seems there are ten who are twisting, distorting, and abusing the simple truth of the Bible. Given the warnings in scripture against such things (2 Peter 2:1-3; Galatians 1:8-9), it amazes me how many will eschew the commands of God and dare to live in the path of His holy and consuming wrath (Hebrews 10:26-27; Romans 1:18-19). False teachers flaunt their arrogance and will reap their just reward (Jude 12-13; Matthew 7:21-23).

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Outside Influences

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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.

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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.

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Choose Your Friends Wisely

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“Choose your friends wisely” is an adage with profound spiritual implications. Many choose their friends based on shared interests in things in this world, be it sports teams, fashion, food, or entertainment choices. In my experience and observation, very few choose their relationships based on how spiritually nourishing they think they will be.

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This begs the question of why we would want friends who lead us into a deeper appreciation of things of the flesh rather than those who would help us grow closer to God. If our goal is to live wholly devoted to Christ, we’re going to need to surround ourselves with people who will help us along that path.

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Read God’s Word

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In the last post (see “Test the Spirits”), we discussed being on the lookout for false teachers and teaching, and the need to always test what we hear by holding it up to the standard of God’s Word. I wanted to say a bit more about those things today. Perhaps more than any other point in my lifetime, there is a lot of noise in the community of believers. We certainly live in fascinating times, and many are taking the opportunity to promote their ideas on why things are unfolding as they are.

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They carefully select scriptures (typically a single verse to avoid the context of the passage) to make their case. Some do this for sheer notoriety. Others base entire ministries on it and are taking full advantage of current events to fill the coffers of their ministries. Now more than ever, we must be discerning. We must cut through the noise and read God’s Word.

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Test the Spirits

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1 John 4 begins with a somewhat curious phrase. John encourages the hearers of his letter to “test the spirits”. First, this implies there are many spirits. In our churches today, it is common to hear about the Holy Spirit, but there is often little attention paid to the other spirits in our world. We ignore these other spirits at our peril. Behind every false teaching, you will find a demonic source.

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Yes, demons are real. They exist and flood the spiritual realm surrounding us. When we go along with false teaching, we are following demons. How’s that for a sobering thought? If we are not careful in examining the teaching we are listening to, there is a very good chance we aren’t being taught God’s truth at all. Instead of growing in our faith, we are opening our minds to demonic influences.

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