False Prophets
Notes
Transcript
My kids really wanted me to make paper airplanes with them, eventually I folded
Held the door open for a clown the other day, thought it was a nice jester
We are starting to wrap up this series, this is the penultimate message of the series, and in two weeks we will start a new series on Romans 8, one of the most in depth chapters in all of the New testament.
Today, Jesus is wrapping it up and he will tell us we need to know enough so we can identify false prophets and false teaching, because he will say, there is a narrow path that leads to life, and a wide path that leads to destruction. He is going to hone in on two things that keep us from the narrow path, the first one is other people and that’s what we will talk about today, and the other thing is ourselves, and thats what we will talk about next week.
One of my favorite theologians, Martin Lloyd Jones, who wrote preached these sermons on the Book of Romans, and those messages were turned into these amazing books, he said the passage next week is the most scary and sobering of texts, because we deceive ourselves into thinking we know Jesus, when we may not actually know him at all. Some of you know people like that, who for whatever reason they aren’t tuned into their own lives. So, today we start this way;
15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
Here is what you need to know, there are not only true pastors, or speakers, an people who want to give you good information, but there are false ones that want to lead you astray, and they want to lead you the wrong way and deceive you.
This week we are learning about the preachers and teachers amongst us. So its about me and all the people who try to teach you the Bible; the small group leader; the Sunday School leader, all of us.
Its almost like the old joke, there are two kinds of people, those who can count and those who can’t, and Jesus is saying there are two kinds of teachers in the world, those who want to teach good theology to save your soul, and those who don’t. This is not a new problem, Paul warned about this same problem back in the book of Acts. Paul had started the church in Ephesus, it was only about 2-3 years old and he knew he had to leave them, in fact that is what he told them
29 “I know that after my departure savage wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock;
30 and from among your own selves men will arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.
31 “Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.
He said, look I have to leave you now, and you need to know, the moment I leave there are going to be these people who will come in and they are going to try and destroy you, they won’t hold back. In fact, some of those people are already here and they will try to pervert the gospel to prove the way of life they want to live, to get people to follow them into their perverse way of thinking, but I am telling you now so you can be vigilant. Don’t forget that over the last three years, I had to tell these they were wrong all the time, but I did it with tears in my eyes because I cared for them.
As a side note, I think this is where we fail too often, we let people teach perverse things and we don’t stop them because we want to think the best of them, but Paul said even if you love them and think the best, don’t hold back from stopping them from leading the flock astray.
2 Peter is written to people to discredit the false prophets amongst them, and these false prophets have always been in the church and have always tried to deceive the people.
A.W. Tozer once said, “the most important thing is the thoughts you have about God.”
So when Jesus says beware of false prophets here, he is not talking about the gift of prophecy. Some of you may not know this, in the list of spiritual gifts we can have, Paul tells us there is this spiritual gift called prophecy. Now, this spiritual gift of prophecy isn’t what the world tells us prophecy is, its not foreseeing the future like some people believed Nostradamus could do. This gift of prophecy in the Bible is the ability to speak into peoples lives and encourage, guide, and lead people with scripture and words. I am not sure if you have ever had anyone speak prophetically into your life this way, but it can change you, it can build you up and help you.
Prophetic words split nations
We have to know what we are dealing with, its not in this moment what he is talking about is I saw a picture that looked like this, and it means all this. This is not what Biblical prophecy is, what that is what we said we are talking about this moment where people give moments of clarity affirmed through scripture.
Jesus comes and he says, “beware,” and he is meaning we have to stop being naive; we have to be aware, and wake up, some of us just accept what we hear and never doubt it. Listen, you should always check what a preacher or a teacher tells you against scripture, even me, look it up, and if you come up with something different, lets set up a meeting and sit down and talk about it, not the moment I come off the stage, but lets get together. Scripture tells us what set the Bereans apart was they took what they heard and checked the scripture to see how valid it was.
11 Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica(the Berean Jews), for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.
Just so you know, the only scriptures they had to check what Paul was telling them for truthfulness was the OT scripture. Listen, some of us think we aren’t supposed to do this kind of work, we are just supposed take whatever someone gives us and do nothing with it.
There is a completely different group of people who think doctrine isn’t the answer, its just love everyone, its just do more missions, its just more worship, thats the answer to all of this. And listen, I love worship more than the normal person, I could sing about his goodness forever, and we think all of this is all that really matters. While all of that is good, and we can point to our need to do all of those things, Jesus tells us, the antidote to false prophets isn’t all those things, its right thinking; we have to have some doctrinal roots so we can know who is leading us correctly and who is leading us astray.
Do you know the way the FBI and all of these government agencies teach how to recognize counterfeit money? They don’t teach you by showing you a ton of examples of counterfeit money; they teach you by studying real money, and knowing all the ins and outs of what makes it real. Then, when you see false you see counterfeit money you will know it immediately. The same is true with theology, if you want to know what is counterfeit you have to spend enough time studying what is true so you can easily spot it when it is fake. But we want the easy route, studying is too hard.
William Hendrickson said this, “The kingdom then is not for weaklings, waverers or compromisers, it is not for Balaam, for the rich young ruler, Pilate, and Demas… it is not won by means of deferred prayers, unfulfilled promises, broken resolutions and hesitant testimonies. It is for strong and sturdy men like Joseph, Nathan, Daniel, Elijah, Mordecai, Peter….Stephen… and Paul. And let us not forget such women as Ruth, Debra, Esther, and Lydia.”
Jesus is saying we are to take the hard road, even when it means we have to study or spend time meditating on what we have learned.
Every single one of us, whether atheist or christian, we are on a spiritual journey. Whether we believe it or not, ever single one of us has a spiritual journey, atheist doubts are just beliefs that can’t be proven, if this is you, you just have an alternate faith position.
Even something as simple as saying, “at least they are not suffering,” is a religious statement. Don’t believe me? How do you know they aren’t suffering anymore?” The truth is, “you made a statement about something happening on the spiritual realm of which you have no physical evidence.” So, even that is this spiritual journey, because you are having faith in something, and I use this as an example, because as believers, we believe those who follow Jesus spend an eternity with him in Heaven when they die, but there are non-believers who believe the exact same thing. But you have to ask them, how do you know this, do you have evidence? What is it you believe that makes you think thisis truth if it isn’t Jesus. So, Jesus concern is that we are on the right path and not following some weird perverted version of the truth.
Jesus is saying don’t be naive about the fact that all around you there are people who want to direct you to false things and false ideas.
Johnathan Edwards says, “When the Church comes, alive Satan comes alive.” He is saying when the church is growing and coming alive to truth is when the enemy will wake up and start to fight back it isn’t when the church is stagnant the enemy feels a need to fight.
What Jesus wants you to learn with this is, its not just sin that will ruin you faith; its false teaching as well. The sad thing is, lots of times when you are spiritually hungry you will kind of slip toward things that are off from the truth.
His point isn’t make sure you don’t get involved in a false religion, because that would be obvious, most of us can spot that kind of heresy pretty quickly.
15 “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
If it were just don’t get involved in other religions, man, that is easy, we can look and see that religion doesn’t follow Jesus, I get to not go after that, but thats not what he’s not talking about. What he is talking about, is the teaching that you don’t recognize right away because its dressed up all nice. And we tend to think that this person is dressed up like a sheep so its hard to recognize, but thats not exactly right. In the culture they are living in the shepherd would dress up in his own sheep’s clothing, and what is important here is false prophets don’t deceive people by impersonating sheep, but by impersonating the shepherd. So, these people to be scared of, its not so much about you its more about me, the leaders and teachers.
The scary thing about the teachers he is talking about, is this guy isn’t down on all fours pretending to be a sheep. He’s standing at the front saying this is the way you should go and that is the way you should go. But they’re pretending to be just like a normal leader. That’s why its harder to discern; if it were other religions it wouldn’t be hard, we’d see right through that, we wouldn’t have to discern anything.
16 “You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they?
17 “So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.
18 “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit.
19 “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
20 “So then, you will know them by their fruits.
Notice what he doesn’t say here; he doesn’t say there is one tree that bears fruit and one tree that doesn’t and when you walk into the orchard you will easily be able to tell; that’s kind of how we picture it. We think we will walk in and one fruit is going to be growing and beautiful and then the other one is going to be nasty and gross, and we will be able to see it clearly from a distance. However, when he says bad fruit he means poisonous; what he is saying is it’s going to look the dame, but when you eat it, its going to be gross.
Here is how you can see this, this idea is the same image he gives later when he talks about a house built on a rock and a house built on the sand; I know, I know, we have this idea we can see that clearly, we mostly think this means on the beach by the water, or on some solid rock, but again he is talking about you can’t see it clearly unless you get underneath and see how it was really built and examine it.
He is saying, you are not going to easily recognize it, and thats why next week is scary, because he is going to talk about it with us. He will look at the disciples and tell them you may know me, but I never knew YOU. He is going to tell us the problem isn’t that you never went to church, because you did, but its I never knew YOU. You see, its not the people who are clearly not of God, its the people who look like they have it all together, but at the root, they don’t; all of these images are eerily similar.
So, they question is what do these people do and what do they teach?
First…
Ezekiel 13:10
10 “It is definitely because they have misled My people by saying, ‘Peace!’ when there is no peace. And when anyone builds a wall, behold, they plaster it over with whitewash;
The False prophets will say, “peace, peace,” because they want us to feel good about our situation and our world. So, they deemphasis the hard ideologies of christianity, the things that are hard to deal with because it doesn’t fit in to our way of how society should run. The problem isn’t so much what they say as much as what they choose NOT to say. The false prophet, in 1 Tim 6 is someone who is doing it for financial gain, and sometimes a false prophet can be controlled by money, and so they won’t say the hard things because they are afraid of what they may lose.
There is a distrust in what we don’t say even more than what we do say.
Here are the ways people today are saying, “Peace, peace.”
They don’t teach on hell because its not a good idea for our culture. So they say, lets de emphasize the idea of hell, we are all Good - no worries for any of us.
They don’t talk about work of Holy Spirit. They say, he did something back in the day, but not anymore.
False prophets talk a lot about the love of God and how much he loves everyone all the time, but never speak of his holiness.
False prophets are deprived, but not those who are depraved.
About God’s universal fatherhood of every human being but nothing about his unique fatherhood of only those who are his children through faith in his son.
About how much God will give us, but nothing about obedience to him.
About health and happiness but nothing about holiness and sacrifice.
Their message is a message of gaps, the greatest of which leaves out the truth that saves.
2nd thing they do..
1 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will also be false teachers among you, who will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing swift destruction upon themselves.
The problem is destructive ideas that are actually wrong. The only antidote to false teaching is true teaching, that’s why preaching straight through chunks of scripture is so good. You don’t get to pick and choose what you are going to keep or leave out. Bob Russell… good pastors have 8—10 topics. So when you preach this way and the hard stuff comes up, you have to go through it, so it makes the Bible the authority and not me. And thats why nothing can substitute the scriptures and that is why the Bible is your biggest weapon against the false teaching, because it gives you a solid base to go on.
Acts 9 tells us it is our job as an elder and pastor to protect the sheep from the wolves that come in.
So what is the way we fight back against false teaching? We get into the word.
The regular Christian isn’t immersed in the word and the crazy thing is we live in a time and a place where we can get it more than anyone in the history of the world. There is no substitute for the Word, and thats where it gets scary, when you give authority from the word it will mess with your theology if you let it, when you don’t try to twist it to your own agenda.
He cant love you more than himself or his own plan or glory and its going to push back against you. And mess you up, it’ll change everything.. and here is why you fear that.
Think about the drug addict, when you try to tell them they have a problem and need help they don’t want to hear it. And when truth pushes against you and tries to tell you to change, we can realize we are self addict; we are really addicted to ourselves.
That is what is happening many ways in this room we want to go in our own direction and do our own thing because we love ourselves even more than we love God.
