Be Careful Who You Follow

We live in a very interesting time in history.

The internet has opened access for us to an unbelievable amount of information on God and the Bible.

YouTube has hours and hours and hours of videos of preachers and Bible teachers.

Amazon can deliver almost any book you could ever want within a matter of days.

We have Christian radio stations, podcasts, and TV channels.

You could literally listen to Bible teaching and preaching every hour of the day if you wanted.

On one hand, this is an incredible blessing.

You and I can, in an instant, have access to some of the greatest theological minds the world has ever known. We can read books from great men and women of God throughout the ages and draw strength, encouragement, and understanding from their words.

On the other hand, we face a difficult challenge.

With all the voices out there, who should we listen to, and how can we know?

If you are just learning about Jesus, you may not see totally that there are a number of people who claim to follow Jesus but aren’t actually a part of his kingdom.

Throughout our study of the Sermon on the Mount, we have seen that Jesus is confronting the scribes and the Pharisees, the religious leaders in those days.

People followed them because they thought they were godly, but in reality, they were leading people away from the truth.

In our passage this morning, Jesus gives us a clear warning: be careful who you follow.

Read through Matthew 7:15-23 with me.

In this passage, Jesus challenges us to be very careful who we follow.

I want to give you three considerations this morning of how evaluate the people you listen to, read, and follow.

As I apply this to others, I also want you to know that you should apply this same standard to me! As a man called to preach and lead, I am accountable to God and to you for what I do.

With that in mind, let’s look at dig in to what Jesus tells us here.

No matter how much we like someone, or even how solid they have seemed, we have to...

1) Acknowledge that not everyone is who they claim to be.

Look at verse 15 again.

Jesus begins by calling us to be on our guard for people who aren’t who they seem to be.

Specifically, he is talking about religious leaders who appear to speak for God but are really in it for themselves.

Some of you are cynical enough that this isn’t hard for you. You have been burned, so you don’t really trust anyone. That isn’t exactly a healthy place to be, and I would encourage you to let God work in your heart to see what is at the cause of that.

Others of us, though, are much more trusting, especially when it comes to people who claim to speak for God.

We want to think the best of others, and we don’t want to be judgmental, so we assume that everyone is probably really trying their best.

In Jesus’ day, he was speaking to the crowd about the religious leaders. He would later expressly condemn them for their hypocrisy in a series of “woe” statements. Here are some of them:

Matthew 23:25–28 CSB

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup, so that the outside of it may also become clean. “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside, but inside are full of the bones of the dead and every kind of impurity. In the same way, on the outside you seem righteous to people, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

To the average, ordinary person in Israel, these guys seemed to have it all together. However, they were wolves in sheep’s clothing; men who weren’t truly following God but were instead living to make themselves famous.

Part of our assumption as Americans is that the bigger an organization gets, the better it must be. We have applied that to churches, so if the person’s church is big and they have a TV ministry or a massive online following, we assume it must be that they are a good, God-honoring pastor or teacher.

The mark of a man or woman’s life and ministry is not found in the number of subscribers they have on YouTube or what time they come on on TBN.

It isn’t about how many books they sell, or if they have a full display in the aisle at Target, or whether or not they speak at all the conferences and get interviewed by Oprah.

There are a lot of people who do those things who are in it for their glory, their fame, and they are not trying to exalt God.

Instead of building his kingdom, they are consumed with building their platform.

Not only that, but remember that you don’t have to have a large following to be a false teacher. Men who pastor small churches, who most will never hear of, can still lead people astray and be in it for the wrong motives.

I hate to burst your bubble, but you need to be careful who you follow.

Not everyone is in it for your good and God’s glory.

By the way, before you throw all the blame on televangelists or popular authors and speakers, remember how they got so popular in the first place…because people like us listened to them and liked what we heard.

2 Timothy 4:3 CSB

For the time will come when people will not tolerate sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, will multiply teachers for themselves because they have an itch to hear what they want to hear.

We are often easily deceived because we like what we hear.

Whether it is the prosperity preacher who tells us that following Jesus will make us wealthy and all our problems will disappear, or it is the judgmental preacher who condemns anyone not like you to hell, or the postmodern preacher who tells us that nothing is actually right or wrong, we are drawn to what we like to hear.

You need to ask yourself why you like listening to or reading or following the people you read and hear and watch.

To do that, you are going to need to...

2) Carefully examine the fruit of their teaching and lives.

Read verses 16-20 again.

The way to spot a wolf is to carefully and prayerfully evaluate the fruit of both their teaching and their lives.

Jesus gives a clear illustration here: the fruit a plant produces is in line with the kind of plant it is.

Apple trees only produce apples, grapevines only produce grapes, etc.

That just makes sense, doesn’t it?

Think for a second about what fruit actually is.

Fruit is what a plant produces in order to make more of itself, right? When you cut open an apple, what do you find inside it? Apple seeds to grow more apple trees.

So then, the fruit of a person’s life could be thought of as how a person is reproducing himself or herself in the lives of others.

As you evaluate whether or not you should follow a person’s teaching, take time to evaluate what kind of person you would be if you followed their teaching to the letter.

Ask questions like this:

Does what they teach contradict what God says in the Bible?

Does their teaching help me live for God’s kingdom first, or is it more about me?

Does their teaching exalt Jesus as the only way of salvation, or do they present him as one of many options, or even a “Jesus + works” kind of salvation?

Do they exalt God as holy and hold up God’s word as a standard of right and wrong, or is it more about how I feel and my experience that determines what is true?

Do they project pride and condemn people for things the Bible doesn’t?

Don’t just apply that to their teaching, but also examine the fruit of their lives.

Do they model selflessness or selfishness? Does their demeanor exalt Jesus, or do they make it all about them? Are they marked by humility or arrogance?

As we evaluate the fruit of a person’s life, we also acknowledge that no one is perfect.

Every teacher says something wrong at some point, everyone still wrestles with sin and does what they shouldn’t, just like an apple tree might have a bad apple every now and again.

However, if you are examining someone’s life, and you are finding bad apple after bad apple after bad apple, there is something wrong with the tree.

What does Jesus say about that? Look back in verse 19...

It is our job to evaluate the fruit of a person’s life as best we can.

From what we see, we need to make a call about whether or not we should follow their teaching and/or example.

When all is said and done, though, we must...

3) Allow God to be the ultimate judge.

So far, Jesus has told us to watch out for false teachers. Other places in the New Testament even call us to speak out against false teachers.

However, Jesus’ focus here is to remind us that God is ultimately the judge of every human heart.

The Bible is crystal clear that those who claim to speak for God are held to a higher standard:

James 3:1 CSB

Not many should become teachers, my brothers, because you know that we will receive a stricter judgment.

There is a harsher punishment for those who teach others than for those who don’t serve in those roles.

When a preacher/teacher/writer/mentor steps up to tell people who God is, what he is like, how we are to respond to him, etc., that preacher is going to be held responsible.

The way he teaches or the way she writes can distract people from who God really is, and God doesn’t treat that lightly.

Jesus warned the disciples about this. There was a time when small children came to him, and he warned the disciples about the danger of doing something that would hurt their ability to know and follow God:

Matthew 18:6 CSB

“But whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to fall away—it would be better for him if a heavy millstone were hung around his neck and he were drowned in the depths of the sea.

That is a really difficult saying!

He said that death by drowning is better than facing the judgment that false teachers will face.

Look back at the chapter to see how they will be judged. He starts in verse 19...

That is a picture of the judgment false teachers will face in hell.

Jump down to verses 21-23 again, because they deserve a closer look.

This is why we say that God is the ultimate judge.

These folks gave lip service to Jesus as Lord. They had done things that may have made others think that they were great people.

Ultimately, though, God knows their heart, and they had never truly come to Christ.

It wasn’t that they followed Jesus for a while and got off track.

Jesus says that he never knew them, which means they never had a relationship with him.

He is God, so he knows who everyone is. However, he didn’t ever have the personal relationship with them that we are supposed to have.

False teachers may deceive a lot of people, but they cannot ultimately fool God.

Teachers will be held to a higher standard, but that doesn’t mean we are the only ones God judges.

Look back at verse 21.

Who did Jesus say would gain entrance into heaven? The one who does the will of his Father.

Well, isn’t that the good works that people say they did in verse 22? Those things might come as a part of what happens, but that isn’t the starting point.

In response to Jesus’ call to follow Him, people asked Him this question:

John 6:28–29 CSB

“What can we do to perform the works of God?” they asked. Jesus replied, “This is the work of God—that you believe in the one he has sent.”

This is it. You see, you don’t get to heaven because you do the works of God perfectly, because none of us can; you get to heaven because Jesus did them for you.

You don’t get into heaven because you did the best you could; you get into heaven because Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for your sins.

While you were lost, separated from God, his enemy, and apart from him, Jesus lived a sinless life and died in your place. It’s not your goodness that gets you into heaven; it’s Jesus’ perfection that gets you in! He’s the only one who perfectly fulfilled the will of the Father, and he gives his own righteousness to you! How incredible is that?!

Now, as we have seen throughout our study on the Sermon on the Mount, he calls you to live that out in your attitudes and actions, but those are coming as a response to what he has done, not to get into the kingdom on your own merit.

So who gains entrance into heaven? The One who did and still does the will of the Father! You are allowed in because God sees his righteousness instead of yours. When you place your faith and trust in Jesus as the Lord and leader of your life, His perfection covers your sin. It’s not your performance plus Jesus; it’s Jesus and Him alone.

That’s why the Apostles, when they were asked to defend their teaching, said,

Acts 4:12 CSB

There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to people by which we must be saved.”

You gain entrance into heaven because Jesus was the one who fulfilled every single picture in this section. He was the only one who was perfectly obedient without any hint of selfishness, and so he is the only one who can clothe you today.

Where does that leave us this morning?

Well, I want to challenge you first and foremost to examine yourself to see if you even know Jesus.

We have hit this for a few weeks in a row now, so it is worth giving serious thought as to whether or not you have ever truly turned from sin and turned to Christ.

Paul tells us,

2 Corinthians 13:5 CSB

Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith. Examine yourselves. Or do you yourselves not recognize that Jesus Christ is in you?—unless you fail the test.

Don’t gloss over this—Jesus said that there will be a bunch of people who think they are getting to heaven, and they are dead wrong!

If you are confident you are saved through Jesus’ death and resurrection, then take some time to think through the main voices you are allowing to speak into your life.

If you followed their teaching to the end, where would it lead? What red flags do you see in their personal and public lives that give an indication that they may actually be wolves in sheep’s clothing?

Ultimately, it is up to God to judge every human heart. However, examine the fruit of the lives of the men and women you listen to and follow.

Be careful, then, who you follow.