11-16-2024

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 once knew a man who could impersonate many people. No one famous but many local people that we knew. It was really quite amazing.  The voice pattern, the inflections, the pronunciations were all very accurate. If he was out of sight, you might have trouble figuring out if it was the real person or him. It made me wonder how often we trust that the person on the other end of the phone is who we think it is.  Or is the likelihood 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 like a university or a Church.  If the speaker has a title after his name, we tend to trust them more.  There are 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 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. If this teaching does not fit with anything else in Scripture or it contradicts Scripture; it is a false teaching. 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. 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