What's In Your Head

You have beliefs in your head that you live by.  Most people have no idea where these beliefs came from, and precious few have any idea that these ideas they live by have roots in philosophy.  Just lost most of you!  No, please stick with me.  I want to tell you some very important things.

People believe and live by the craziest ideas.  Saw a real-life story on TV last week about a family who lost a teen daughter to homicide.  At the graveside the father saw a Cardinal  (song bird) and chose to believe that his departed daughter somehow inhabited that animal,  and he was comforted.  OK.  A couple weeks ago a nice lady was at our house to transact a little business with my wife.  As they shared how they enjoyed collecting,  this woman proceeded  to tell us her life story.  She had had a near-death experience, and decided that from that point on she would get the antiques stuff she wanted, and "let nobody stand in my way."  She was quite intense and serious.   I was reading a well-known Progressive Christian author this week who was laboring to make the point that Jesus never commanded anybody to do anything, He just "invited" them. . .  Please.  That idea is just plain silly.  Ideas like that can only be floated in a population that doesn't read what Jesus really taught (the Bible).  We could go on with this forever, because the world is full of wrong ideas. 

BUT!  And listen to this carefully.  (This is the kind of moment when, if you were a little kid, I would grab you  by your shoulders and say "Look at my eyes, and listen to me!")  Into this world of zillions of wrong ideas, God has revealed some Truth.  Some things that are absolutely and always True.  Ideas we can plant our feet on.  Sink our teeth into.  That never change.  As Christian philosopher Francis Shaeffer said, "God is there and He is not silent."

Jesus taught about what He called being "born again into the kingdom of God."  (John 3:3)  

So that happens to you.  Here you are, standing on this earth, and God had done a big work of grace in you, and you know you will never be the same.  He begins to change what you believe about virtually everything (2Cor. 5:17).  You begin to understand Truths.  And the more you understand Truth, the more you recognize the falsehoods all around you in the world.  This is normal for the believer in Jesus.  In fact, God calls us to purposely cooperate in this process of renewing our minds (Rom. 12:2). 

To someone who has thought a lot about this subject, any and all of those old beliefs you held could be traced back to some wrong system of thought.  These systems have names.  Much of the ideas in the minds of people around you are rooted in hedonism, humanism, materialism (not the love of money, but philosophical materialism), transcendentalism, and utilitarianism.  Now, few people can even state what they believe, much less know how those beliefs fit in to any system.  However, if you are a believer in Jesus, and serious about your faith (let me throw in that if you are not serious about it, don't be feeling comfortable about your relationship to God), you need to be serious also about knowing truths, and being able to discern what is true, and recognize what is false. 

Now here is the point I have been aiming at.  The most dangerous falsehoods, the most ingenious counterfeit ideas threatening our generation, are coming out of the philosophical system called Postmodernism.  You and I need to know it when we see it.  And we must be willing to call it what it is.  In Christendom it is called Progressive Christianity.  It is, simply, unbelief.

Next time I get a chance to write for Libby, I hope to explain further just what beliefs I am concerned with: that is, how Postmodernism has yielded the pet teachings of Progressive Christianity.  Also, just what teachers are we talking about?

Guest post by David Nitz

So Let's Define This "Love" Thing.

Up until fairly recently, I was pretty closely involved in local church that I liked pretty well.  As time passed I began to suspect that I had issues with some of their ideology, but I hung on because I was very deeply invested in one of their small groups, a group aimed specifically at mothers.  This particular church had a bit of an odd small group set-up, the individual groups are done in "semesters" of about 4 months, and at the end of those 4 months, all the small groups take a break and people are invited to sign up for the next round, or semester.  The group I was involved in had a core group of 5 or 6 moms that signed up each semester, and then a smattering of others who came and went over the course of 2 or 3 years.  I invested myself more deeply into that moms' group than I had ever invested in any other group or relationship, outside of my marriage, and the women in it I considered true friends and sisters, and I was more truly vulnerable with them that I have ever been with anyone in my life.  We pushed each other, challenged each other, held each accountable, wept together, prayed ardently for each other, and when the "semesters" would end, we would continue to meet together "unsanctioned," because we were invested in each other, we loved each other, and  we shared fellowship on a level that is sorely missing from today's Church.  It was real.  And I miss it desperately.  With every fiber of my being I miss it.

My relationship with that group slowly started to unravel as my issues with the larger group's ideology started to become more pressing than I could ignore, and I started to raise questions in the smaller group setting.  And on one very specific occasion, I got into a (perfectly civil, though rather tense) disagreement with one of the group's leaders about the encouragement/admonishment precept, and the definition of Biblical love.

I had recently had a not-quite-as-civil FB debate with someone about the idea of Biblical hate (Romans 12:9), and I was sharing with the group where I was struggling with self-doubt, specifically in the area of having a gentle spirit (1 Peter 3:3-4).  I have of course done a lot more research and hard study on this idea since then, but at the time it was a fresh and painful struggle.   This leader suggested that I "fast love," for 40 days, and by this I /believe/ she was saying to only "love" people for 40 days.  But as I considered admonishing to be one way to truly love other Believers,  I said: "Yes, but (as this debate had been going on for some minutes by this time), what do you mean when you say 'love?'" and she replied, "Radical acceptance."  At this point the other leader politely interrupted us and steered the conversation in another direction, as it was decidedly tense, and causing tension, even when that tension is the bi-product of an ardent pursuit of truth,  is generally frowned upon.  But that was the moment when I knew that I was probably going to lose the rich and rewarding and hard-fought, hard-won relationship with this small group of believing women that I so cherished. A meeting with these same women leaders some months later to discuss some of my issues led to my family choosing to finally leave the church, and while my heart was still fully vested in that moms' group, it was made clear that continuing to participate wasn't going to be an option.  And in the end, I lost almost every relationship I had built during my time with that group.  And all over this crazy little thing called love.

Because the thing is, friends, it really IS all about love. The problem is, we've allowed the climate of our culture and the pursuit of cultural relevance to diminish, dilute, and cloud what the Bible is saying, what God's intent for us is, when He uses the word "love." I hear a LOT about "loving on" people and the local community being the highest good, which as far as I can tell means being very pleasant and inviting and friendly and accepting and throwing large social events, but as I was researching for this blog, it became more and more apparent that that is not at all what Jesus was talking about when He used the word love.  So .....if it really is all about love, it seems paramount that we effectively define the term.

Now, I am by no means a scholar, but I was raised by one, and I went to a Christian college where I picked up a little knowledge here and there.  I took a particularly tough course my junior year called Bible Study Methods, and while it it made me crazy and ate up all my evenings and weekends and cost me sleep, it did give me the basic tools to do some deeper digging when I find that I want to more fully understand a Biblical passage or idea.  So bear with me for a second, while we get scholarly.

There are 4 different types of love in the Greek language, and, extremely simplified, they are romantic/sensual love (eros), brotherly love (philia), familial love (storge), and divine love (agape). Generally speaking, there's not a lot of debate or confusion about the first three, so we are going to focus on the fourth, Agape.
Vine's Expository Dictionary tells us this:

"Christian love, whether exercised toward the brethren, or toward men generally, is not an impulse from the feelings, it does not always run with the natural inclinations, nor does it spend itself only upon those for whom some affinity is discovered. Love seeks the welfare of all (Romans 15:2) and works no ill to any (Romans 13:8-10); love seeks opportunity to do good to all men, and especially toward them that are of the household of the faith (Galatians 6:10,  1 Cor. 13,  Colossians 3:12,  Colossians 3:14). Christian love has God for its primary object, and expresses itself first of all in implicit obedience to His commandments (John 14:15, John 14:21, John 14:23; John 15:10; 1 John 2:5; 1 John 5:3; 2 John 1:6). Self-will, that is, self-pleasing, is the negation of love to God."

So there are a few ideas here that I want to focus on. First, agape love is entirely counterintuitive to humans, it's sacrificial, selfless, and unconditional; it's bestowed upon another with complete disregard to the merit or worth of that person. By that I mean, it has nothing to do with feelings, you don't love someone because he is lovable or deserves love or has any way made himself worthy of that love.  You  love him because you choose to love him. It's a deliberate choice that has nothing to do with the worthiness or "lovability" of the loved.  And this sort of love cannot be achieved without knowing Jesus.  It is a divine love that emanates directly from His nature and cannot be experienced or facilitated in any way other than through a relationship with the Living God.  

Second, the Bible makes it excruciatingly clear that the lynchpin of this divine love is obedience. I mean, really, there's no way for it to made any clearer, and it comes straight out of the mouth of walking, talking Jesus at least four times in the NT. In John 14:15, He says, “If you love me, keep my commands," and goes on to repeat that basic idea several more times.  He makes it VERY clear, there's no way around it: obedience = love.You might want to sit with that one for awhile before we move on. 


Third, in order to keep His commands, we have to know them!!  It seems that there should be a Duh Factor here, but there are so many people that believe that a relationship with Jesus is mostly a spiritual experience, and almost entirely ignore the practical application side of it.  There is, indeed, a moment of spiritual conversion, the moment that the Spirit descends on and indwells a person, and that person becomes a new creation.  And it's at moment that we truly experience God's love  for the first time.  But then what comes after that?  Now it's our turn, to follow the greatest commandments: love God and love one another (Matthew 22:36-40).  And since we know that love of God = obedience to God, the next step is to learn the basic standards of living that God calls His people to adhere to, ie: His commands.  Lucky for us, our loving God had pretty much everything we need to know written down and compiled into a single volume for us, easily accessible to most of us and ready to be studied at any time.  All we have to do is take the time and make it a priority.  The fact of the matter is, we CANNOT effectively love God or each other if we don't prioritize studying His Word.  Period.

Fourth, one of the reasons that love equals obedience is simply that God deserves our obedience; He is owed complete and unquestioning conformity to His will and implicit submission to His lordship in our lives. But there's also a practical side to it: His commands have everything to do with how we should live and how we should treat each other.  If we are stealing, we are hurting whoever we steal from.  If we are sleeping around, we are taking what doesn't belong to us and defiling the bodies of others. Cheating, slandering, lying,  - all of these things God tells us NOT to do, and all of these things hurt our neighbors. It's all very basic: practically applying God's commands to our lives (ie: obeying) causes us to treat others with true divine love by default.

Fifth, nowhere in the Bible or in my other studies have I been able to find a time when agape love is synonymous with radical acceptance.  In fact, by its very nature, the "radical acceptance" paradigm seems to invite complacency and self-will.  I myself feel like it would be immensely easier for me to get stuck in the quagmire of my own sin if I knew that the people around me were far more likely to pat me on the shoulder and say, "Everyone struggles, we love you regardless, take your time on your journey," than, "Whoa hold up, you are messing up bad here we love you too much to just let it go."  Admonishment IS indeed a tool to be used to more effectively love other! I can't find anywhere in my study that tells us to "radically accept" other believers who are willfully sinning, but I can find a dozen places where it says to admonish them and hold them accountable.  Because radically accepting their sin is just allowing them to travel a path of self-destruction outside of God's will, and therefore outside of His love, wherein admonishing them to obey God's commands shows them true love and in turn pushes them to better love God and others.  Round and round it goes!!

This topic is huge, I probably should've called  this "Part 1," and not tried to tackle it all in one day.  There is no way I have done it justice today, and no way that I have covered or adequately defined every aspect of divine love, but I have learned the basics of what I was trying to learn and shared what I was hoping to share, I think.  I would recommend reading everything that Vine's has to say about agape, and I also found these two links (this one defining the terminology of 1 Corinthians 13, and this one about admonishing one another in love) to be very insightful.  And as always, I encourage you to click on all the Bible links and get into the Word for yourselves, and if you have any questions, comments, or disagreements, please do leave a comment!  There's nothing I want to see more that truth ardently pursued and Christ's mind revealed, and I will always do everything I can to facilitate that.

As my due date approaches ..

Hey DIUR blog friends, 

As my due date approaches, I fear that real life is going to be taking more and more precedence over blog life, so bear with me. Today's blog is partially written but probably wont go live til tomorrow, because I have an ultrasound this afternoon to get another looks at all of Pickles' bits, we haven't seen him on the inside since 17 weeks!

I will likely have my brilliant scholar of a father guest for me increasingly often as I get more and more pregnant and in the few weeks following Mr. Pickles' arrival, so count yourselves lucky, because he actually has a lot more good stuff to say than I probably ever will!

Thanks for your understanding,
Libby and Pickles

The Scripture Cannot Be Broken

We have become occupied around here for several months with discussion of the Church: not just local church, but the entire Body of believers in Jesus everywhere.  Occupied with it's history, it's condition in the world now, and it's future.  Truth be told, I am thinking about these things primarily for selfish reasons.  I want to have some significance in God's business during my short stay on this planet.  I dread insignificance (don't you?) and am deeply encouraged by relationship with God, by what He has revealed to me in the Bible about His love for me, about my having a role in His great purpose and plan (however small that role may be).  You know, I guess, about "You are the potter;  I am the clay."  That is, the appropriate way to think about our relationship to God is with humility, at every turn letting Him be God. 

A part of this humility is letting God's Word have authority over me (us).  Jesus declared: "Your Word is truth." (Jn. 17:17). He added elsewhere, "If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken." (Jn.10:34-35). "Laying aside the commandment of God, you hold the traditions of men…, making the word of God of no effect through your traditions." (Mk. 7:8, 13). Paul declared that "All scripture is given by inspiration of God…."(2 Tim. 3:16). The Scripture is the Word of God (Rom. 9:6) and God cannot err (Titus 1:2). Jesus said, "'It is written'…by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God." (Mt. 4:4). Since the Bible is the revelation of God in words, we must take its authority seriously.  By that I mean that God, via the message of the Bible, has the right to instruct us what to do, as well as to put boundaries around our behaviors. 

Can I say that I am a follower of Jesus, or in any sense claim to be under God's authority, if I am willing to set aside the Bible when considering what is right and wrong?  Can I say I belong to God (in the sense of being one of His people) if I deny the authority of His Word over my life?

The results of denying God's authority is illustrated everywhere every day.  Consider this report, keeping in mind that the leader mentioned is the highest ranking leader of a major American Christian denomination.  

So I call on you to be alert to teachers, messengers, spirits, who call you to slip out from under God's authority, and to follow their new plan:  their new, modern, deeper understanding of the ways of God.   The great apostasy Paul wrote of so much is for real. 

We all feel the need for significance.  But I want to be significant as a servant of God, not as a servant of the Devil.

-Guest post by David Nitz

On False Teachers, part 2

So in last week's post (False Teachers, part 1), we established beyond a shadow of a doubt that false teachers exist, and that we need to be vigilant to guard ourselves and our church bodies from them. We also looked at what to look for and how to identify false teachers, should we suspect that one is one our midst. All really tricky stuff, not to be taken lightly, and impossible to achieve without being thoroughly immersed daily in the Truth. So then what's next? If you become entirely convicted, through prayer, study, wisdom, and counsel, that there is a false teacher inside of your body of believers, what should you do??

The answer to this is so simple, and yet practical application of it so unbelievably difficult.  American Christians have been taught for generations now that Christians are nice.  Somehow nice has been equated with good, so if you're not being thoroughly nice, or perhaps if you have a "critical spirit," you're not actively following Jesus' teaching of love and compassion.  But friends, I have read many passages in Scripture that are not nice.  At all.  I've seen John the Baptist point to a group of Pharisees and yell, "You brood of vipers!!" I've heard the apostle Paul say, "I wish they would just go the whole way and cut their testicles off rather than keep harassing you about this!"  On another occasion, Paul told us that, if someone we know should claim Christ but choose to remain in sin, we are not even to eat with them! Jesus Himself called people names all the time, including hypocrites, fools, snakes, and liars.  And have you ever read the book of Jude??  Holy gees, now there was a guy that was NOT fooling around! Of false teachers he has this (among other things) to say:

 "These people are blemishes at your love feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm—shepherds who feed only themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn trees, without fruit and uprooted—twice dead.  They are wild waves of the sea, foaming up their shame; wandering stars, for whom blackest darkness has been reserved forever."

Yowch.  Those are some distinctly not-nice, critical words.  And all of our Biblical heroes have harsh words to say about people and ideologies that need to be harshly addressed.  Because the Bride of Christ is precious, and she must be defended..  The Gospel of Christ is sacred, and it must be defended.  Our faith in our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ is the foundation for every true thing in the universe, and must be defended at all costs.  And friends, sometimes that requires nice, good, kind, compassionate people to say and do harsh, difficult, painful, and not-nice things.  I feel like I should apologize for saying that, but the fact is, I am unashamed of the Gospel of Christ.  These are not my ideas, I have no authority.  This is the authority of the Scripture that I hold out to you now.

I love the beginning of the book of Jude, when he basically says, "Brothers and sisters, I so wanted to write to you and just celebrate how awesome our faith is, but instead I feel compelled to address this other ugly issue."  And I get that, Jude. I totally get that.  I, too, wish that week after week I could just write to everyone about how awesome our faith is, how loving and compassionate our Savior, how boundless the grace and mercy.  But instead, I feel compelled just as Jude did to "write and urge you to contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to God’s holy people." (Jude 1:3)  That's the task with which I believe I have currently been entrusted.


 Jude then continues with these decisively harsh words about false teachers: "Certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord."

In Paul's second letter to Timothy, he warns, "The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron." And he tells Timothy that he will be a good minister of Jesus Christ if he points these things out to his brothers and sisters, nourished on the truths of faith and of good teaching  (2 Timothy 4:1-2,  6).  I like the sound of that.  I very much like the idea of being a good minister of Jesus Christ to my brothers and sisters.  I very much like the idea of being nourished on the truths of faith and good teaching.  But I suppose that is beside the point. I suppose the point is that these Scriptures suggest to us that false teachers aren't to be ignored, or approached politely, or addressed gently.

So where does that leave us?  When it comes to the difficult topic of dealing with false teachers, what should we do? What are we, as Believers in Jesus and defenders of the Faith, called to do when we believe that that Faith is being corrupted by darkness? 

False teachers are to be called out.  Publicly.  There are no kind provisions set aside in the Bible for false teachers, the way there are for exhorting and admonishing your brothers and sisters who are struggling.  There's nothing that tells us to tread softly and deal gently.  Because false teaching causes spiritual devastation.  It is destructive and brings the way of truth into disrepute (2 Peter 2:1-3).  It's just plain old unacceptable and must be brought to light and dealt with as swiftly and decisively as possible. Paul himself called false teachers out by name (1 Timothy 1:18-20, 2 Timothy 2:17-18).  Sometimes, regardless of what the current church climate tells us is acceptable, sometimes we just have to do or say something really harsh in defense of our faith.

So there we are, friends.  This is tough stuff, I know it, and it takes so much wisdom, so much discernment, so much prayerful consideration.  We can't just run around the streets shouting "False teacher!!!!" at every person whose doctrine we disagree with.  But we must immerse ourselves in the truth, and always stand at the ready to contend for our faith in any way that we're called to.  Being a follower of Jesus is amazing, entirely fulfilling, boundlessly joyous.  But it's also hard.  It also requires sacrifice and suffering.  Sometimes it requires us to do stuff that we absolutely hate.  That's painful beyond measure.  

But we do it.  

Because consider Who's asking.  And what He's already done for us.

On False Teachers, part 1

I love the Bible. I love how poignantly clear it is on some points, how epically mysterious it is on others.  I love how the text is alive, how it beckons us to immerse ourselves, study more, discuss longer, compare passages.  I love how all the truth of the Universe is contained in a single volume of text, that God chose to reveal Himself to us so that we can know Him. I love how I can be hurting, so deeply I can barely verbalize it, and I can turn to the Scriptures and they will comfort me and guide me and remind me where my peace and hope lie.

But then there are things in the Bible that are tough. I mean, there are some really difficult ideas in there, ideas that are hard to understand, and ideas that are hard to carry out. In a discussion I had recently with another Believer, he said, "If you start assembling the teachings of Jesus and His Apostles regarding certain subjects, you come up with stuff American Christians cannot handle.  It is not nice at all." We live in a culture where certain ideas are so ingrained that we have just come to regard them as truth, without ever even giving them much thought.  And certain mentalities and behaviors are straight-up demanded of us, in all situations (ex: radical and unquestioning tolerance and acceptance, unwavering kindness and gentleness, etc), that again we never stop to question their validity. Are we called on to treat each other gently and kindly in most circumstances? Definitely (Ephesians 4:32). Even when we are called on to call each other out on our sins (ie: admonish), we are counseled to be gentle (Galations 6:1, Timothy 4:2), because Heaven knows that we are all sinners, and next time it might be YOU who needs to be exhorted.

But are we called upon to deal kindly and gently with every single human being who crosses our path? Indeed not. A harsh truth that most of you will really struggle to accept. And since the entire point of this blog is to keenly examine Scripture in order to better understand and practically apply God's revelation to our every day lives, today I want to look at a group of people who the Bible tells us should be dealt with swiftly and harshly and without apology: false teachers.

False teachers area big subject in the Bible. Paul (2 Corinthians 11:13-15, 1 Timothy 4:1), Jude, (yeah, pretty much the whole book), Peter (Peter 2:1), John (1 John 4:1), and Jesus Himself (Matthew 24:11), they all warned us strongly to be on the lookout for false teachers and false prophets, which gives me the impression that it's kind of a big deal. So this week let's look at how to identify a false teacher, and next week we can talk about what should be done once one is identified. The church in Galatia was apparently dealing with just such a problem around the time that Paul penned them his letter. In chapter 5 he addresses it in a straightfoward manner, and so gives us some basic guidelines for identifying false teachers. Here are the basics:

False teachers are not terribly interested in getting people to obey God.  In fact, it's kind of their main goal to convince people that they don't really need to obey God (Galatians 5:7), but since they are working under the guise of a Bible teacher, they can't just say, "Hey, this obedience stuff is stupid, let's all get drunk!" They have to be sly and sneaky. They have to distract you, subtly trip you up, tell you things that sound good and right, but in actuality have no Biblical merit, and usually undermine some of the most basic of Biblical principles (another good reason we should all be fully immersed in the Word and constantly encouraging and admonishing each other)! But oh! Will they ever be convincing! They will usually be gifted orators or wordsmiths, saying just the persuasive things that your ears are longing to hear. It flutters your heartstrings and speaks directly into your life, just exactly what you needed to hear today!  But when you really try to break their teaching down into basic principles, you find that it's little but false flattery and empty rhetoric. Really really pleasant words that just don't mean anything.  Paul put it best in his second letter to Timothy (4:3-4), when he said, " For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.  They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths." Youch. Scary.

False teachers will also be very influential in the church, maybe even gain almost complete control over it (Galations 5:9). You know that verse we've all heard about yeast working through the whole batch of dough? Well, this is what Paul was talking about when he said that. An effective false teacher is going to insert him- or herself right into the inner workings of your church, maybe right up front standing in the pulpit, or maybe, with seeming humility and hospitality and submission, a little more behind the scenes, but still pulling all the unseen strings. And slowly he or she is going to start inserting his or her own deceptive and misleading ideas into the truth-teaching until the whole group has gone entirely off the rails. I don't know about you friends, but I find THAT to be a very frightening and sobering idea. 

Look for a certain amount of prideful behavior (Jude 1:11, RE: "the way of Cain"). In my experience (both personally and with others) pride can be sneaky and sometimes masquerade as its exact opposite, humility.  Look for a person who is angry, defensive, passive aggressive, or downright hostile when challenged; who throws around his or her weight, sometimes subtly, sometimes not so much, in an attempt to intimidate; who shuts down, ignores, or derides your honest questioning. A true Gospel teacher wants nothing more than to engage you about Biblical truths, and will delight in your questioning and leap to the challenge to hash out tough ideas with you. A false teacher wants you to shut up and listen, fall in line, and not cause any problems. And for Heaven's sake, if you have questions or disagree, don't say anything!  But friends, this is not Biblical, this is not sound doctrine. Paul told us that OF COURSE there will be divisions among you (1 Corinthians 11:19), and he was delighted when the Berean Jews questioned everything he said and weighed it against Scripture (Acts 17:11). Because a true Bible teacher has nothing to fear from your doubts or questions, and will in fact be thrilled that you are actively seeking and searching truth! 

A question to ask is, is he or she consistently only preaching half or part of the Gospel? This part is tricky, because it might take years before you realize that you have been learning at this person's feet all this time and you have NEVER heard certain ideas or doctrines even discussed! Giving money to the church, serving in your community, treating others compassionately - these are all wonderful ideas, but they are NOT the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  They're just little bits of it, and if you are not consistently being preached and taught the whole truth, you are either being unwittingly cheated (your preacher/teacher is misguided) or intentionally misled (false teacher). 

Probably the most important question you can ask is, who does he or she say Jesus is (Matthew 16:15-16)?  If you find yourself under the sway of someone who is iffy about Who Jesus is - who might balk at being asked to confess the Lordship of Jesus Christ (ie: Jesus is Lord <Romans 10:9>, there is only one  God, <John 17:3>, and Jesus and God are one and the same <John 10:30>) - who refuses to define where he or she stands on (or maybe even out-and-out denies) the substitutionary atonement (ie: Jesus died so that we wouldn't have to, and through Him and Him alone are we saved (1 Peter 3:18, John 14:6), - who occasionally makes broad statements about how maybe we can't exactly know the truth, that they themselves are too humble to embrace certainty, that maybe other faiths and religions have some merit and we should not write them off, that we're all on our own path but they are all leading to the same God - that condemn others for declaring that the truth IS knowable (John 8:32, 1 Corninthians 2:16) and make any sort of suggestion that this truth should be unquestioningly obeyed - if you find you are under the sway of such a person, run away.

 Run away screaming.

 Because friends, Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Son of God and the Lord of all,  the one and only Redeemer, and anyone who truly knows Him will be willing to shout that from every rooftop in town.

Friends, only by being thoroughly familiar with the truth will we be able to recognize a counterfeit.  And we ARE talking about a counterfeit here, right? So what are the characteristics of an effective counterfeit?  It's not going to be obvious; how would that fool anybody or lead anyone astray? No, a false teacher will very likely seem to possess many of the characteristics that we have come to associate with Godliness or Christ-likeness: humility, gentleness, a willingness to serve, compassion, etc etc. Don't be fooled! Test their spirits (1 John 4:1), and don't be deceived, because these false prophets, they are indeed among us. The Scriptures are so clear on these ideas, if we will just study! If we will just read, and then get together and talk! 

There are several books of the Bible that were written specifically to warn us against false teaching within the church: Galatians, 2 Peter, 1 John, 2 John, and Jude. It is really challenging to identify a false teacher, Satan masquerades as an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14), and his ministers masquerade as servants of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:15).  Please friends, I urge you to daily arm yourselves with the Truth, because our human natures are so easily deceived.  It's so easy to accept teaching that tickles our ears but does nothing to further the Kingdom of God.

As always, I welcome comments, questions and dissent, and I say that with all grace and honesty; it's not a challenge but an invitation. The entire spirit of this blog is summed up by Colossians 3:16: "Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts."  I'm just one voice, but the pursuit of Christ is a corporate one, so I beg of you to lend me your voice as well, that we may sharpen each other as iron sharpens iron, and together reach a better, fuller, and more effective understanding of the the Word of God.

Don't Rock The Boat!!

There are many times when I easily recognize that someone else has a better handle on a topic or situation or idea than I do, and when that I happens, I like to give that person the opportunity (and sometimes a nudge, or a shove (-;  I've got a couple of people who have really wrapped their heads around certain ideas that I've only just begun to think about, and I can't wait for them to guest post for me), to share their knowledge with my readers.

This is one of those times. Now, I'm just a kid who has been blessed with a solid Biblical foundation, and I consider myself a student of the Bible, because I study it, I read parallel passages and commentaries, I consult other people who have the same zeal for discerning practical application of Biblical truth, and I do my best every day to apply those principles to how I live and interact with others. Those are my credentials.  My father, who has again agreed to guest post for me here today, attended a well-respected seminary, has a master's degree in ancient languages, has taught philosophy and sociology at the college level, and has been a tireless student of the Bible his entire life, as well as a solid model of what a Godly man, a real and true persuer of Christ, looks like.  Those are his credentials. And it's not that this makes him the Grand Master of All Knowledge and Understanding, it's that it makes him someone who has thought about this particular subject (and more than a few others) a whole heck of a lot more than either you or I. So let's lend him an ear:


"On a rare occasion it will happen that someone will stand on an important principle and dissent from a group.

I'm going to give you three challenges here; the first two are easy, but the third one only one in perhaps hundreds will ever accept. The first challenge is this: name for yourself what groups you belong to. I'll get you started. You are first a member of the human race, then also of some tribe or nationality, then maybe a political party, maybe a workplace, maybe some associations or clubs, maybe a church, maybe THE Church, and certainly a family. These groups have enormous influence over who you are: how you think, how you feel about things, and what you want: greater power than you may be willing to admit. Every group you belong to has a culture: the way things just ARE in that group. And you are expected to conform to that culture. In fact you are under constant pressure to not dissent from that culture. For fifty years or so this subject has interested many good thinkers, who refer to the general subject as "groupthink."

The second challenge is for your memory. Can you recall anyone associated with you ever standing alone, on principle, against your group? It is a rare thing. Why? The answer lies in an idea some teacher (can't remember who!) suggested to me long ago. That the basic motivator for fallen humans is fear. The fallout if you were to dissent is terrifying. If you dissent you will be considered disloyal, or spiteful, or evil, and shunned, and it really doesn't matter if the concerns you voiced were valid or not.

Now, God created us and knows all about the power of groups. He knew when He planned out His Church and its life in the world what His peoples' experiences would be. And in the Bible He has left us tons of instruction about this subject. How am I as a Believer in Jesus to live in this world? The Bible word "world" is an English translation for a term meaning a beautiful, fallen system. Almost synonymous with our term "culture," only bigger. So John (I John) wrote "Don't be loving the world," and "We belong to God, but the whole world lies in the power of the Evil One." So the situation we have is that the world is fallen, in rebellion against God and thoroughly corrupt, and that corruption infects all our human groups. And in the event an individual Believer is convinced by the Spirit of God, as he reads the Bible, that some teaching or practice in one of his or her groups is simply and clearly wrong, there is conflict. First inner conflict, and then, as God gives grace to the dissenter to speak up for Him and His ways and His Truth, there comes the conflict of dissent. I'll make two examples, both about the Church.

In the 1850s or 60s, in England, the state had an official church, the Church of England. An official teaching of that church was that infants became Christians, and wholly children of God, by baptism. Called baptismal regeneration. Along came a bright, young preacher named Charles Spurgeon, who saw clearly that the Bible taught no such idea, and he found the grace to proclaim that salvation is by faith alone, irrespective of baptism.

 Do you suppose there was fallout?

 A current day example now. In our generation, there has been great, organized cultural pressure to accept homosexual practice as normal and acceptable. The nominal Christian church has bowed to this pressure. Now the Scriptures are explicit and unquestionable about the plan of God for marriage, and sexual boundaries. But if you dare to speak up for God on this subject, dissenting from the culture, there will be fallout.

 Feel the tension?

When Jesus said to His followers "You are the salt of the earth" this is exactly what He was talking about.  (Now if you are a reader of The Message you may have been confused here, where that version sadly fails with its reading  "You're here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth."  That is obviously not what Jesus meant.  Salt was used throughout the ancient Near East to slow down spoiling of meat).  Jesus is challenging His followers to live out His Truth in full view of the world, so that the difference in lifestyles is obvious.  Be truthful when everyone else lies.  Be a faithful husband or wife when everyone else finds excuses to fool around.  Call Jesus Lord over every area of your life even if your church leaders won't.  

So my third challenge is rough:  

If God's Word is clear, but your group is fuzzy, dissent.  

If the boat needs it, rock it.  

Be willing to stand alone until God brings along other faithful Believers to stand with you. 

 Paul wrote to the Romans (12:2) 'Quit copying the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God's will for you, which is good and pleasing.'"