Good Morning All!
2 Peter 2:1a &3a, “But false
prophets also arose among the people…. And in their greed they will
exploit you with false words.”
I have a friend that is very talented at
impersonations. The freaky part is that
he does not do famous people but rather it is people that we know and interact
with on a regular basis. He is very good
enough, in fact, over the telephone, you would not be able to tell for sure who
it was. It was quite amazing. The voice pattern, the inflections, the
pronunciations were all very accurate.
It made me wonder how often we trust that
the person on the other end of the phone is who we think it is. Oh, the likely of someone trying to mislead
us is so small that it will never happen; but could you be misled by
someone? If someone could sound just
like a friend or an acquaintance, how far could they go to fool you? What do we look for when we trust our ears
and what we hear?
The first is to recognize the voice. When we hear someone that we know, trust and
respect; we tend to believe what they say.
The next is probably familiarity with the message. If the person we trust is simply re-stating
some prior truth or expanding on it, we would probably trust that to be
true. After someone we personally knew,
we probably trust someone from an institution that we trust. It might be a university or college or some
other group like that. If the speaker
has a title after his name, we tend to trust them more. There are many criteria which we follow but
when do the alarms start going off? When
do we start to question what is being said?
In our verse, we contracted a longer
passage down to the main elements, false prophets, and the exploitation by
false words. Scripture warns us that
there will be many who do this. Even at
the time of the writing of the Bible there are already false teachers spreading
false doctrine. So how do we know the
truth from the falsehoods?
The apostle John tells us to “test the
spirit”. We need to see if it sounds
like what we have already been taught in the past. If someone comes up and says they have
discovered a whole new way to interpret Scripture; it is going to be a false
teaching. We may have to apply the
teaching in a new way, but it is still the same teaching we have always
had. If this teaching does not fit with
anything else in Scripture or it contradicts Scripture; it is a false
teaching. If it denies one of the basic
truths, it is a false teaching. So, if
it rings false to us; it probably is false.
God’s message to us is simple. Jesus died to pay for our sins. This we receive by faith. It allows us to stand righteous before
God. As God declares us righteous, we
are free from the devil and the burden of the law. We are free to live the life that God wants
us to live. We live in his holy presence
with thanksgiving and praise; asking him to meet all our needs and calming all
our fears. Since God has reconciled us
back to him, God wants us to reconcile with our neighbor and to befriend and
aid our brother in need. We are to live
out our life in joyful expectation of God keeping his promise of eternal
life. This is the basic Christian faith;
any variance from this is probably a false teaching.
It might sound good, but it probably is not. Listen closely, trust God’s spirit to guide
you as you listen and hear the impersonators teach for false greed and avoid
them and their lies.
Dear Father, give us a
discerning heart as we listen to the noise of the world and the lies with which
it attempts to deceive us. Keep your
Word strong and its proclamation true.
Hold us safely in your arms and protect us from all evil. In Jesus’ precious name we pray, amen.
God’s Peace,
Pastor Bret
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