2 Timothy 4:2,3 “preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires”

Last night I watched the film “Heist.” It was very depressing movie, wrapped up in an entertaining package. The story is about a group of criminals stealing a shipment of gold. It is a movie about backstabbing, about greed, about betrayal, and deception. At the end of the movie, the main character is driving off in his old beat up truck with the gold in the back. To get there, he had to lose a friend, lose his wife, and he can not ever return and see any of his old friends or acquaintances. He had to give up everything for that gold.

This morning I went to a church near to my apartment building. I walked into that church and I very nearly turned around and walked out. I walked into the church, and was approached by the greeters stationed at the “customer service” style counter in the middle of the atrium. Overstuffed chairs, tassels, expensive carpets, gilt mirrors and pictures, flowers, and just an overwhelming sense of opulence hit me. The praise music all referred to God in the third person and is best described by the phrase “happy clappy” The sermon was all about how God wants to bless us, and if we are truly following God, then everything will work out (sounds good so far) and if we are really sincere and really into God, then we won't have problems afflicting our every step. (Woah, wait, what?) The teaching today included “If we are not praising God louder than Satan is yelling at us, we can not succeed and overcome our problems...so if you are a quiet person, you had better learn to be loud fast.”

When we follow God, we are grounded in the word, checking everything we are taught against it. We raise our Bible high as the standard, the bar by which everything is measured. And yet, our human nature is so contrary to what God wants that we able to be sidetracked easily. People in general will believe something because they want to believe it. They will listen to a lie because it agrees with their own preconceptions or natural urges. We would rather think that we are in the right, than hear something that would challenge us further. We want to be “good” and so Satan finds it easy to teach “truth” as people want to hear it, and we as Christians will oftentimes hear this false truth and believe it because we want to.

Jeremiah complained that the people listened to false prophets who prophesied peace and earthly desires (Jeremiah 23:16-22) in fact, in verse 22, God says through Jeremiah “But if they had stood in My council, then they would have announced My words to My people, and would have turned them back from their evil way and from the evil of their deeds.”

Jeremiah. Paul, Peter, and Jude all dealt with it as did John (who most definitely wrote about it in his letters).

Be wary, your adversary the devil stalks about like a roaring lion. The only way to protect yourself from theology that sounds good and seems good, but is not and will take you away from our savior is to entrench yourself so deep in His Word that you will recognize any attempt to pervert the Gospel.

Hold a pattern of healthy words which you have heard from me,
In faith and love which are in Christ Jesus.
Guard the good deposit through the Holy Spirit
Who dwells in us, Who dwells in us,
Hold a pattern of healthy words