Sunday, March 10, 2024
Always Question Every Teacher and Pray that the Holy Spirit Teach You
I have no doubt that many people who say they are Bible-believing Christians not only do not know their Bibles but defy most of what God commanded in it.
These same people have no fruit of the Spirit, seem angry all the time while acting irritated and even rage when corrected with scripture.
God never uses these phrases "Bible believing" or "evangelical" but He does use "follower of Christ."
Matthew 16:24-26
Discipleship Is Costly
24 Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow Me.
25 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.
26 For what good will it do a person if he gains the whole world, but forfeits his soul? Or what will a person give in exchange for his soul?"
God said very clearly that if we are His true disciples we will obey Him, we will love His Word and speak it boldly.
John 14:15-16 "15 If you love Me, you will keep My commandments. 16 And I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate to be with you forever—…"
John 14:21
Whoever has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me. The one who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and reveal Myself to him."
John 14:23
"Jesus replied, "If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word. My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our home with him."
John 15:10
"If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love, just as I have kept My Father's commandments and remain in His love."
1 John 2:3
"By this we can be sure that we have come to know Him: if we keep His commandments."
1 John 5:3
"For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome,"
2 John 1:6
"And this is love, that we walk according to His commandments. This is the very commandment you have heard from the beginning, that you must walk in love."
What is the common thread through every verse? It is that those who love Christ will love His Word and want to follow it. When they are challenged by others to obey Christ they will not be angry but grateful for the admonishment.
Those who are pretenders will become angry when corrected with Scripture, they will even destroy a relationship to maintain their sin against the Word of God.
The biggest violation of God's Word I see in our day comes from those who know the Bible and use it disgracefully to fit their culture. They leave out phrases God said and add phrases God never said to justify what they want to believe. I run into this more often than anything else among believers.
Many phrases in our culture have been snatched from their context and declared to mean things very different from what Christ said.
The devil knew he couldn't get church goers to out and out deny scripture but he could and did encourage them to change God's Word to malign Him while feeling proud of themselves about how clever they think they are and that others will "like" what they say because it allows for bad attitudes and wrong thinking.
Ephesians 6:12 "For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places."
The pretenders feel secure and happy as long as they are quoting scriptures, it doesn't matter if they are being used correctly or in the mindset of Christ.
The best way to fool and manipulate a new believer or a pretender is to use scripture out of context, even adding some of their own ideas to the scripture and passing it off as God Who said it. The devil loves this mess.
If we want to know the trust about anything we must ask the Holy Spirit to reveal it so that we can see the passages in context the way God meant to convey them. Then every passage must be in the context of the rest of the Bible. The Bible does not contradict itself, the principle in the New Testament will be seen in an example in the Old Testament.
Those who seek Christ with all their heart and desire to know only truth will find themselves being at odds with most of Christianity in these end times. So many things that Christians follow and believe are not commands of God and bring a false belief system that makes them proud of themselves rather than submissive to Christ.
My only admonishment is to pray that Christ will remove from your mind and heart anything that you learned that is not true and replace it with the truth as you read the Bible and study what He said. The best way to avoid deception is to ignore all the noise in the church coming from those who have been taught the wrong way and begin to depend entirely on the Holy Spirit.
You will be amazed at what you will see in the churches that are actually against God's Word but purport to be from the Bible. We are living in a day when we must evaluate everything anyone says about God and comparing it with what God says in His Word.
John 16:13-15
"But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own initiative, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; therefore I said that He takes of Mine and will disclose it to you."
If you have been authentically born-again the Holy Spirit lives in you and can teach you better than any person. We share with one another as we always evaluate what is said according to the Bible.
Acts 17:11-12 "11 Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true. 12 As a result, many of them believed, along with quite a few prominent Greek women and men.…"
The Bereans never just believed what a man said, they went home and searched the Scripture to make sure it was true. We ought to always do the same when we listen to anyone claiming to be a teacher of the Word.
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