A man named Ebo Noah, a self-proclaimed prophet in
Ghana, was predicting A worldwide flood that was
supposed to happen on Christmas Day of 2025.
He was building several arc like structures he claimed were going
to be people's salvation. They were going to save them
from the wrath of God that was supposed to come on Christmas
Day last year and after the rain never came, he was seen in
$100,000 Mercedes-Benz. Some of the people gave up their
whole life savings in their homes and and thousands of
people travelled many miles to get to this man and to get to
these arcs and when they finally got there, they were unfinished.
One person was so angry that he saw a nearby boat that he
thought was this false prophets and burned.
It turned out not to be his boat and he felt deeply regrettable
about that. Now those of us who hear this
story and know the Bible look at this and we're like, how could
so many people be fooled by this?
We know that God has promised he's never going to flood the
earth again. That's the whole point of the
rainbow, that God said he would never flood the earth again.
Oftentimes Christians though, don't really know their Bibles
and even pastors don't really want to teach Christians the
Bible. They think all all we got to do
is just get them to that point of salvation, right?
If we just give them the basic, very basic understandings of,
of, of the good news that that Jesus came to save you and all
you got to do is pray a prayer after me.
If all that we do is get that to happen, then God will do the
rest of it. And we don't have to do anything
else. We don't have to learn anything
else. We don't have to teach the
people anything else. But as Jesus has been teaching
us in the Sermon on the Mount, he said there's a narrow path
and it's a hard one, and few there be that find it.
And we know that it's not true that a Christian life starts and
stops at salvation. Yes, it starts there, But we can
commit the rest of our lives, as we've heard people confess
today, to go on to live a life that honors God, that that seeks
to obey Him to, to find out all the things that he said and to
worship him through that lifestyle.
There are many warnings from Jesus to his disciples about
dangerous teachers, about the danger of not learning, about
the danger of learning, from those who don't want to actually
teach you the whole counsel of God, but rather they just want
to give you little quips and quotes and cliches to lead your
Christian life. And even Satan uses people to
trip us up, to tempt us and to teach us false things.
He uses false prophets to lead others astray and some to never
come to the true faith. And so today that is what we're
going to be talking about. We're going to be in Matthew
Chapter 7, verses 15 through 20. We've been walking through the
Sermon on the Mount and the and Chapter 7 right here where we're
at, Jesus basically drops an atom bomb to close his sermon of
some warnings and some challenges to who's going to be
the true disciples and who are going to be the false ones.
And we'll get to that in the next two weeks.
It's going to take us three weeks to get through this close
that Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount.
But today we're just handling 15 through 20.
And I've got only two points I want to make out of this.
And the first one is this. Be careful who you learn from
the first verse, verse 15. Beware of false prophets who
come to you in sheep's clothing but are inwardly ravenous
wolves. This is a huge statement from
Jesus and there's a lot packed in there.
And so I want to dissect this with you and, and find out what
he means in in the context of this.
And then how does it apply to us?
And but in but first, before we get into what false prophets
are, we should probably understand what a true prophet
is. A prophet of the Bible is
someone who was commissioned by God to speak God's message, to
speak to the people. They often would say, thus saith
the Lord, God told me this, now I need to deliver this message
to you. Now oftentimes we think of a
prophet as someone who just tells the future, someone who's
going to say, oh, this is going to happen in the future.
But actually the majority of what the prophets did in the Old
Testament was deliver a message from God that had nothing to do
with the future. Some of that is mixed in though.
And it's not just a person who tells the future then, it's a
person who teaches God's truth, right.
And so while I, I do not believe there are any more prophets
today like the prophets in the Old Testament, nobody is
receiving new revelations from God to tell the people, you see,
the Bible is closed. It's called the Canon of
Scripture has been decided early on in Christianity.
There's no more books being written.
There's no more people that can say, I have a new message from
the Lord. And then we add it to Scripture.
Know the book that we have, the 66 books of the Bible are the
finished work of God's revelation to humanity.
And now the church's job is to go back into all of this and
read this and learn it and, and live our lives by it.
It is complete. It is a complete work.
It's sufficient for everything we need for life and godliness.
And to back up what I'm saying, I would share in Hebrews 11 New
Testament it says long, long ago, at many times in many ways
God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days
He has spoken to us by His Son. Jesus is the last and final
prophet who is also the Son of God.
He brought the completion of what the Old Testament was
talking about. Now we have the writings of the
apostles who were after Jesus, but what were they doing?
They were looking back at Jesus. The prophets looked forward to
Jesus. The apostles look back to Jesus
and everything that he had to say.
By the way, there are no more apostles anymore either.
I would not trust anyone or any group or any church who claims
to have apostles and prophets. We'll get into some of that a
little bit later in the sermon, but again, in Ephesians 220 it
says the church was built on the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.
So what is the saying that the foundation of all that we
believe is built on the Old Testament prophets and the New
Testament apostles, with both of them being supported by God the
Son in the Scriptures? And when you build a house,
right, we, we look around, there's a lot of construction
going on in Utah, maybe in your neighborhood, and you watch how
a house is built. It starts with the foundation,
but you don't keep. Once the foundation is built,
you don't keep building a foundation.
You don't just keep going. Cement all the way up with more
rebar right now. You eventually put on the things
that make it the house, the wood and the the interior, the
drywall and the electrical and everything that's entailed, even
the decorations to make the house.
The New Testament church is the building of God's house,
spiritually speaking. There there are no more need for
physical temples because we are the temple.
The Bible says so. But we still in our day have
people who claim to be prophets and have started new offshoot
religions. I'm going to get to that more in
our second point. But today's prophets, although
we can look at guys like Ebo Noah and say that's just
ridiculous if you know your scripture.
Many were fooled. Today's prophets have to even be
even more clever by twisting Scripture and to make them mean
something that they don't or they just leave things out.
The word here for false prophets in our text back in verse 15 is
pseudo prophets. So they're not really the real
thing. You've heard of, you know,
pseudo ephedrine. It's not like the real stuff
right in the cold medicine, it might have some of the same
properties and make you feel a little bit of the same way,
right? Pseudo just means false, false
or fake, phony. That's what these prophets are
and today we can still the Bible uses language that they are
false teachers then. So when we think about this word
prophets in the New Testament, it is someone who is claiming to
proclaim the word of God, much like a preacher stands up and
says this is what God's word says and here's what it means.
And so in the New Testament talks about these prophets,
there will be these false teachers that are trying to come
into the church, right? Second, Peter 22 says, but false
prophets also arose among the people.
Just as there will be false teachers among you who will
secretly bring in destructive heresies, false teachers will
secretly bring in destructive heresies.
Now, if we go back to our verse and look at that, this, the next
part of this, they come to you in sheep's clothing but are
inwardly ravenous wolves. You see, they're pretending to
be like one of us. They might even look like one of
us. They're coming in in secret.
They're not so obvious. They're not so obvious that then
when they walk in the door or when they come into your group
or even when they stand on the stage, that they are in fact,
false teachers. That's the whole point.
That's how Satan works. You see, Satan, as, you know,
contrary to what a lot of us think or believe, he's not
hanging out in cemeteries all day long, you know, or hanging
out at the haunted houses during Halloween alone, right?
He is and has always been trying to twist God's word, trying to
come in and fool God's people. And he does it in sly, sneaky,
crafty ways. And he's, he's gotten pretty
good at it and he's pretty smart.
He's been around for thousands of years.
He's a fallen Angel. And so think about it, wolves in
sheep's clothing. Now sheep's clothing again means
two things. They come to us looking innocent
and harmless and they pretend to be doing everything they're
doing for God, right? That's what sheep are doing,
right? Sheep.
The very image of a sheep is like, wow, nobody's a scared of
a sheep, right? I'm like, you might be scared of
a bull with horns. You're not going to jump the
fence to to go hang out with them.
But a sheep, maybe the ones that have the horns, the goats that
can that that can like really ram you.
Yeah, I've seen some videos about that.
They're pretty strong. But but a sheep is not that
scary looking, right? Very innocent.
But they're claiming to be a part of the pack when really a
wolf describes their true heart motivation.
They're really just there to devour.
Interestingly, when we think about this, we don't, we don't
really think about how easily we could all be fooled.
Doctor Martin Lloyd Jones says this.
The picture we need to have in our minds, therefore, should
rather be this. The false prophet is a man who
comes to us, who at first has the appearance of being
everything that could be desired.
He is nice and pleasing and pleasant.
He appears to be thoroughly Christian and seems to say the
right things. His teaching in general is quite
all right, and he uses many terms that should be used and
employed by a true Christian teacher.
He talks about God. He seems to be saying everything
that a Christian should say. He's obviously in sheep's
clothing, and his way of living seems to correspond.
So you do not suspect that there's anything wrong at all.
There is nothing at once that attracts your attention or
arouses your suspicions. Nothing glaringly wrong.
And as I talked about, you know Satan is good at at disguising
himself, right? It says in in Second Corinthians
11/13 For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen,
disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.
And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an Angel of
light. So it is no surprise if his
servants also disguise themselves as servants of
righteousness. Often times we'll look at
people, a group of people, a religion, and we'll say, man,
these people are really moral or they're really living, you know,
their faith out. And, and we think they must know
God because God is out all about morality and goodness.
And yes, God has a standard for morality, but as we know, he
came to save sinners who can't keep his morality.
But then he empowers us to live it out, but not perfectly.
Again, these are very subtle, say a lot of the right things,
but the problem here is in what he doesn't say.
Will not offend, will not talk about hell, will minimize sin,
won't talk about the commands of Christ other than maybe the
mandate. We should go and make disciples,
right? Minimizes the depravity of man.
Minimizes the substitutionary atonement of Christ.
Minimizes repentance. Never talks about it.
How to repent is the telltale sign of our faith.
Everybody can say that they're a Christian.
In fact, most of our nation probably says they're Christian
in this passage that says you'll know them by their fruit because
it's not just a pray a prayer after me or one day I, you know,
felt an emotional experience. And so therefore that meet must
mean I'm a Christian to prove faith comes through life change.
But the false teacher will never point the people to that because
it seems too harsh. He doesn't want people to
examine their faith. Very watered down.
Sounds like a Ted talk with maybe a couple verses, always
topical and tickling the ears. They don't want to talk about
God's commands or God's call to turn from your sin.
In fact, back in Jeremiah's day in the Old Testament, a prophet
whom nobody liked and nobody wanted to listen to, eventually
they threw him in a pit because the king was sick of hearing him
say thus saith the Lord. There were other prophets in his
day that were saying, Oh no, God's good with everything that
you're doing. And it says this.
They have healed the wound of my people lightly saying peace,
peace when there is no peace, constantly saying there's peace
with God. You've done all that's good and
right, and don't worry about repenting in your sin.
Keep living the way that you're living because God is all about
peace. These are dangerous because they
creep in and invade ministries. When they get you away from the
sound believers and the pastors, they will talk about how it's
actually the pastor who's too harsh or too judgmental.
He's wrong because of his tone or maybe misinterpretation.
And they talk about unity. They want to say the word unity
all the time, saying that other churches believe different
things and and so it's wrong to talk about those.
RC Sproule once said doctrine divides and that's what it's
supposed to do. This is why we have a
confession. This is why we have a statement
of faith. This is why we have distinctive
that we regularly teach and back up through scripture.
We want to be honest about who we are and what we believe
rather than baiting and switching people to get you in
here just to have numbers. This is what you would call
being seeker sensitive, right? Thinking that if I'm just
sensitive to the seekers and don't say anything harsh or
wrong or anything that they wouldn't like, I will get them
in the room. And and when we have a bunch of
seats in the room, that proves how good of a church we are.
I said a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to refer to this this
excerpt by a man named JC Rile. He wrote a book and and part of
it, it's called Jellyfish Christianity.
That's what he calls this that I'm talking about.
And he says, he says this one plague of our age is this
widespread dislike to distinct biblical doctrine.
In the place of it, the idol of the day is kind of a jellyfish.
Christianity. A Christianity without bone or
muscle or sinew, without any distinct teaching about the
atonement, or the work of the Spirit, or justification, or the
way of peace with God. A vague, foggy, misty
Christianity, of which only the watchwords seem to be.
You must be liberal and kind. You must condemn no man's
doctrinal views. You must consider everybody is
right and nobody is wrong. I.
I often run up against this quite a bit because for whatever
reason, the Lord has put a passion in my heart to fight for
doctrine and truth. And I love the church and I love
truth and I love you. And even even if it's going to
be hard to hear, those things are good for you to hear.
In fact, I feel like it would be unloving if I didn't share with
you the things that the Bible says that you need to know.
And because I've experienced it first hand when I was living in
sin, claiming to be a Christian and somebody was willing to say,
hey, look what scripture says, like God, God loves you and he
forgives you, but quit saying you love him back and don't do
anything to show him like you should love this God who has
been so gracious and merciful. And when someone was willing to
have these conversations with me and preachers, preachers willing
to preach. I mean, if I think about the
greatest way in which God has brought about sanctification and
change in my life, it has been preachers not who are giving me
the Ted talks or just generalizing everything or
giving me topical messages all the time.
It was the preachers who walked through the Word of God and it
changed my life and it continues to change my life.
JC Royal continues on this and he says this creedless kind of
religion, we are told, is to give us peace of conscience.
A jellyfish is a pretty and graceful object when it floats
in the sea, contracting and expanding you, You can get it in
your mind, right? Aren't they just some weird
looking but kind of Beautiful Creatures that God made like a
transpellent parent umbrella? Yet the same jellyfish, when
cast on the shore, is a mere helpless lump without capacity
for movement, self-defense or self preservation.
Alas, it is a vivid type of much of the religion of this day, of
which the leading principle is no dogma, no distinct tenants,
no positive doctrine. We have hundreds of jellyfish
clergy, clergymen who seem to have no single bone in their
body of divinity. They have not definite opinions.
They belong to no school or party.
They are so afraid of extreme views that they have no views at
all. We have thousands of jellyfish
sermons preached every year, sermons without an edge or a
point or a corner, smooth as billiard balls, awakening no
Sinner, edifying no St. Never was it so important for
laymen to hold systematic views of truth and for ordained
ministers to enunciate doctrine very clearly and distinctly in
their teaching. When the first the church
started in the 1st century in the book of Acts, you know,
there's these pillars that they started with and it says they,
they had the apostles doctrine, the breaking of bread, the
fellowship and the prayer. And we hold those as like major.
This is why we do church the way we do.
We make sure we have prayer in there.
The breaking of the bread is the communion part, you know, one of
the ordinances along with baptism that we see and, and,
but the apostles doctrine, that's the word of God and
everything that they taught the word of God said we need to
protect this, teach it. In fact, Paul talked about this,
this danger coming, this danger coming when he was in the early
church, when he was getting ready to go basically in Acts
27. He says I didn't shrink from
declaring to you the whole counsel of God, not just jump
around to all the little high points of the things that are
going to make you feel good all the time and never challenge
you. But he says this in Acts 2028.
He says, Pay careful attention to yourselves and all, to all
the flock in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers to
care for the Church of God, which He obtained with His own
blood. I know that after my departure,
fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and
from your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to
draw away the disciples after them.
This is a real danger in our church and in our churches, in
the Christian Church in America, and all over the world for all
time. And there is so much talk about
this in Scripture, how can we not talk about it?
Be foolish to just skip this part and pretend like
everybody's right and nobody's wrong.
I was once told that true shepherds are to be watching out
for the sheep. They're to be caring for them,
nurturing them, but protecting as well.
And a Good Shepherd has two voices.
One voice is that tender care for the sheep.
The tender, the speaking love over the kindness, the grace,
the reminding of you can always come back to the Lord.
But there's another voice that he should have.
That's the seriousness of challenge and rebuke and the
warning of the wolves. Imagine being a shepherd.
You're standing out there and wolves are coming.
Shepherds had a club and a staff or a crook one.
The one side of the crook was to to pull, pull them back by the
neck so you can pull them out. And the club was to hit the hit
the wolves, right. So let me give it to you this
way. Imagine your child is in the
street and a car is coming. Which voice are you going to
use? Which voice are you going to
use? Are you going to say, oh, little
Timmy, there's a car coming? You got to get out of there,
man. Like, come on, let's go, you
know? No, you're going to yell, get
out of the road. That's still loving, right?
True teachers warn of the false ones willing to even intimidate
the wolves and train the sheep to watch out for them and defend
themselves as well. That's what I hope I'm doing
today. By the way, false prophets and
teachers are usually self-proclaimed, right?
They just popped out of nowhere. I know all this stuff.
I have a message that's better than everybody else's message.
Real pastors and teachers, shepherds are called by God and
they're affirmed by other men. I know this stuff is kind of
hard, right? Like this isn't all of the diet
that we get from the word of God.
But I'm, I like to go to the gym.
So a gym analogy would be like, you know, we have our favorite
days of working out, right? That's usually chest and biceps,
you know, but don't skip leg day.
You've seen those memes before. Don't skip leg day.
These are that's hard. It's hard and sometimes this
stuff's hard to hear. So I'm going to move into maybe
getting a little more practical about this and talk about how to
discern between true and false teachers.
Let's go to our next. The rest of the verses.
It says you will recognize them by their fruit.
Our grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles.
So every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree
bears bad fruit. A healthy tree cannot bear bad
fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit.
Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and
thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by
their fruits. I think about this and Jesus is
kind of just given this analogy. That would have made a lot of
sense to people. Now, I'm not much into
agriculture, but I do live by some fruit trees.
You know, I live up by some orchards in Perry.
And so I see these often. But I'll tell you what, I look
at those and I have no clue what kind of fruits going to come off
of those trees. I don't know if it's pears,
apples, grapes don't grow on trees.
But hey, I don't know a lot about that, right?
But how do you know then what kind of tree it is?
Finally, when it bears the fruit, they're like, oh, that's
an apple. Now some of you guys might be
like, hey, I know, you know, I got a book and you know, like
I'm way into this type of stuff. But for most people it's like,
look, I'll I'll just wait till it bears fruit and then I'll
tell you it's a crabapple tree and it's useless, you know,
anyway, I heard some people use that for stuff.
Use it for stuff, right? They just really kills my lawn.
But but so this is how we test who's true and who's not right.
And actually in the Old Testament, there's a test in the
Bible that is applied when someone claims to be a prophet.
This is in Deuteronomy 18. It says, but the prophet who
presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded
him to speak or speaks in the name of other gods, that same
prophet shall die. Wow.
And if you say in your heart, how may we know the word that
the Lord has not spoken? When a prophet speaks in the
name of the Lord, if the word does not come to pass or true,
that is a word that the Lord has not spoken, and the prophet has
spoken it presumptuously, and you should not be afraid of him.
Now we have the benefit of the fullness of Scripture when
someone says like this guy that the flood's coming, like we're
like, no, I don't need to believe you, right?
That's just stupid. As I said, there are other
crafty ways and and methods that these false teachers use.
They try to just slip it in there.
But there are false prophets in history.
And let me just tell you, I would be a coward if I didn't
bring this up. I have grown up in Utah my whole
life and been a Christian a lot of those years.
And when I became a pastor, there was a certain group of
pastors that held these conferences that talked about
how to reach people in Utah. And they would say something
that still does not make sense to me at all, that says they
would say, yeah, we agree. You should never talk about
Mormonism from the stage or Joseph Smith from the stage.
Never. And I just, I just, I don't
understand it because if this is where we live and our friends,
family and neighbors are all around us, wouldn't you want to
be taught by someone on how to navigate that, how to, how to
have those conversations to know the truth in the error?
And, and I'm here today to tell you that when, when Jesus said
that there will be false teachers and false prophets, and
Peter said it and Jude said it and Paul said it.
Joseph Smith is one of those false prophets.
And we can test by that Deuteronomy verse.
Did he give a false prophecy? Well, a lot of them were very
general and vague. But let me just say that in one
instance, in September 2223 of 1832, Joseph Smith foretold that
an LDS temple was going to be built in independence.
And it was this huge thing in the DNC, section 884.
He said it was a revelation from Jesus Christ.
He says that in his writings. I'm not going to read all of it
to you because I just feel like it wouldn't be good in our
church. But he says that this church is
going to be built. This temple's going to be built,
and it's going to be like Zion in Missouri.
And all these people after him kept thinking, OK, when's this
temple going to be built? When's this temple going to be
built? 40 years goes by.
People are making excuses. Generations are longer than 40
years. Finally, 100 years goes by.
And they're like, maybe he meant 100 years by a generation, you
know? And then after 140 years,
finally, the Mormon Church itself admitted this was a false
prophecy. No temple was ever built on the
property and it never came true. And Joseph Fielding Smith
finally admitted there was no expectation this prophecy would
ever come to pass. There's a false prophecy right
there. But it it gets worse because we
compare Scripture now to things that were said.
And in second Nephi 2523, it says, For we know that is by
grace we are saved after all we can do.
And there's the little sly thing.
Use similar language, but then add just in the little twist.
After all we can do, That's where it gets wrong.
We know that grace is by faith alone, not after all.
After all we can do suggests that we must earn this grace
after we've tried our hardest. Then God will finally say, you
can have this atonement applied to you.
And that's not what the Bible says.
It angers me, brothers and sisters, it even gets worse.
It says this is him, Joseph Smith, saying that he's better
than Jesus. It says I have more to boast
about of them than any other man had.
I'm the only man that has ever been able to keep a whole church
together since the days of Adam. A large majority of the whole
stood by me. Neither Paul, John, Peter, nor
Jesus ever did it. I boast that no man ever did
such a work as I. The followers of Jesus ran away
from him, but the Latter Day Saints never ran away from me.
How dare you say this, that you are better than my Lord?
We need to understand this should break your heart, Church,
that we're in a state that our family, our friends, our people,
our coworkers are being deceived by this.
And sometimes it takes the second voice of the shepherd
lovingly to call people out of the false teaching.
It doesn't just stop with him and that religion though.
But I could go on and on about most, if not all of the Pope's.
They claim to be prophets and get new words from God and they
write it down. And the other cult religions,
Jehovah's Witnesses, even Muhammad and Muhammad and Joseph
Smith have something in common in that their religions were
started by an Angel. They claim an Angel came to them
and said, I have this new revelation.
But we know that Paul says in Galatians 1, he says, but even
if we or an Angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel
contrary to the one that we preach to you, let him be
accursed. What fruit did these guys bear
leading people astray? That's the bad fruit, right?
Or it was minimize the work of Christ.
That's bad fruit. Look at me instead, Matthew
2424. Jesus himself says for false
christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs
and wonders so as to lead astray, if possible, even the
elect. He warned us about this and
great signs and wonders, by the way, I mean these guys are going
to be silver tongued, able to wow you with their words, make
you feel some kind of feelings, maybe even possible magic or
miracles. In fact, Revelation 1920 says
about this great false prophet and the beast was captured and
with it the false prophet who in its presence had done the signs
by which he deceived those who had received the mark of the
beast. They were both thrown into the
lake of the OR the lake of fire. There are churches.
I mean, let me just say this, right?
There's a reason why we try so hard when we're picking our
worship songs not to do anything by Bethel Church.
And I know you guys probably all like some of their songs.
I mean, they do a really good musical job at what they do.
And some of the the words of the entire song, you can't say there
was really anything wrong with it.
But I remember when one guy, MacArthur said when he was asked
about this, like, how is it that these people can say good things
or sing such good songs? And he says, well, broken clocks
are right twice a day. And So what are they trying to
do, though? They're trying to infiltrate, in
a sense, to get us to sing their songs and then eventually fall
into their doctrine. And I've heard several stories
of people who have listened to songs or seen things that
pastors have affirmed. And then they go off listening
to the false teaching of Bethel Church, which, by the way, the
leader claims to be an apostle. And his second in command is
called the Prophet Bill Johnson and Chris Valaton, Charis mania.
You know that. And they're the those ones that
are constantly making miracles like the focus of their church,
just, you know, the playing on people's emotions.
And that seems to be what false teachers like to do.
It's always emotional, right? Even the altar calls in the pray
prayer after me. You won't find that anywhere in
Scripture. By the way, I'm not saying that
I, I have, I've done that in the past, you know, like pray this
prayer after me, repeat after me.
And I was talking to one of the other elders the other day and
remembering a man who I was so proud of that prayed a prayer
after me early on in ministry. And guess what he's doing today?
He's not walking with the Lord. He does not believe and so we we
don't do that because you won't find a place in Scripture that
says make them pray a prayer after you or pray and ask Jesus
into your heart. It's repent and believe.
It's a work that God is going to
do in you, and you're going to want to do it without
manipulation. But so many of these
evangelists, they want to be able to say, I have this many
numbers and that many numbers of people come forward and this and
that. And I'm not saying people do get
saved in those types of things. God still uses even the simplest
gospel message to save people, but it's God.
It's not because of the preacher.
So is the the fruit numbers like this is the thing.
And when we're gauging this fruit, the fruit is not numbers.
The fruit is healthy disciples, healthy Christians.
A healthy tree bears good fruit because it's healthy.
That's just what it happens. And so when you sit under good
preaching and the preaching is in the the roots of the word of
God, and he follows his life after Christ, not perfectly, but
you cannot help to start produce fruit even if you don't like
some of the things that he says sometimes.
Course, you probably don't like everything that the Bible says,
but healthy things reproduce healthy things and bad things
produce more bad things. That's what he's saying here.
If a pastor thinks the Bible's boring and has to spice it up,
he should not be a pastor. I'm telling you that because
it's all Christ doing his work, as in as he said in John 15,
five, I'm the vine, you're the branches, whoever abides in me
and I and him he it is that bears much fruit.
For apart from me you cannot do, you can do nothing.
All we can do is abide in Christ, in his word.
Why do we think we have to dumb this down, water it down or or
take up most of the time with all of my stories?
Because you're just not going to understand what this means.
There's a false fruit you ever seen like like a, a wonderful
little like, you know, table setting or you go to one of
those mega stores to buy like furniture for your bedroom or
your kitchen or whatever and they have fake fruit on the
table and some of it looks real realistic, you know, but if you
took a bite into it, it wouldn't give you anything.
It'll actually taste terrible. That's a lot of what comes from
this hollow false pseudo teaching.
You might get some feelings. You might look at it and think
that it looks real. It looks right, but we've got to
be discerning here. Bad trees or false teachers bear
fake and false unhealthy disciples.
It's like if a tree instead of in Psalm one being planted by
the water and is fruitful. This tree is planted by like a
toxic wage or sludge waste pond. But on the outside, the tree is
still growing and it's bearing fruit.
And you're like, hey, it's still a tree.
Are you going to eat that fruit? I'm not eating that fruit.
This is a warning in love to you guys.
JC Ryle again. Worst of all, we have myriads of
jellyfish worshippers, respectable church going people
who have no distinct and definite views about any point
in theology. They cannot discern things that
differ any more than color blind people can distinguish colors.
They think everybody is right and nobody's wrong.
Everything is true, nothing is false.
All sermons are good, none are bad, every clergyman is sound
and no clergyman is unsound. They are tossed to and fro like
children by every wind of doctrine, often carried away by
any new excitement and sensational movement, ever ready
for new things because they have no firm grasp on the old, and
utterly unable to render a reason for the hope that is in
them. But this is the last verse I
want to look at from Paul when he was teaching a young protege,
Timothy. In fact, these are some of
Paul's last words about how to preach.
He says, I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ
Jesus, who is to judge the living in the dead by his
appearing and by his Kingdom. By the way, the Bible says that
not many of you should become teachers, my brethren, because
teachers will be judged with a greater strictness.
We do this under the fear of the Lord.
It says, preach the Word, be ready in season and out of
season. That means when it's popular or
when it isn't popular, just stay in the Word, reprove, rebuke,
and exhort with complete patience and teaching.
Why do we need so much correction?
Because we are so sinful and this is the way to find healing.
But it's loving. But here's where it goes on.
The challenge is this. For the time is coming when
people will not endure sound teaching but have itching ears,
they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit
their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth
and wander off into myths. And here's the issue here.
The people are the problem. In this one.
He's warning Timothy that, look, you're going to be tempted to
change the message because the people want something else and
they're going to go find these teachers and they're going to
get their ears tickled. It's our job as Christians to be
learners of the Word, hearers of the Word, preachers and teachers
of the Word to our family, friends and neighbors to learn.
RC Sproul says every Christian is a theologian.
Theology is important. It is we should know it and it's
our responsibility to be a member of a healthy church, to
sit under good teaching. And even if you're not a member
officially of a church. I heard it said that we vote
with our feet in our wallet. Wherever we affirm, we're going
to go there, we're going to sit and we're going to give money.
And we think it all these false teachers with with unhealthy
churches. And we think, how are they so
big? Like how do they have all this
stuff that they have and we're struggling to get by And you're
like, well, because they're telling them everything that
they want to hear and the people are voting yes, we love this.
Tell me more. Don't tell me bad things about
me. Tell me how I can be wealthy,
healthy and prosper. We must preserve and defend the
truth by fighting air and preaching the whole council of
God like Paul has taught us to, like Jesus has taught us to,
like the Lord wants us to. So let me end with this main
idea. Jesus and many authors, other
authors of Scripture, warn us about false teachers used by
Satan coming into the church to deceive people.
They use subtlety in craft to minimize major doctrines.
They pretend to be one of us, claim to be looking out for our
best interests, but really are promoting themselves and
satisfying their own hunger for power, fame, and money.
We must know our Bibles and submit to preachers who do so as
well. And in this way we will become
more like Christ. We will build his Kingdom on
earth the way He has said to do it, not our way.
And I promise you, the closer you get to Christ, the more you
know about him, the more you love Him, and the more your life
will be changed. Let's pray.
Father, thank you for your word and your stern warnings and your
grace and your love. Thank you, God, that You have
grace on us mere humans who are doing everything we can to try
to interpret Your word, to know what Your will is for our lives.
I pray you'd give us more understanding, more knowledge,
more discernment, no more wisdom.
And I pray Lord, you'd help us to be more faithful today, as is
the goal of week in and week out, that we just become more
conformed to the image of your Son.
Help us to do that. Help us to have discernment
against all the false teachers out there in the world, even the
non religious ones that we're allowing into our hearts through
social media and everything else under the sun.
Forgive us Lord, for our sin and our ignorance and help us Lord
to love you more. I pray in Jesus name, Amen.