Read, Do, & Tell

Ep 28: Look Out for False Teachers!

• Becky • Episode 28

Share episode

Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.

0:00 | 19:02

Welcome back to the podcast!*

In episodes 23, 24, 26, and 27, Amy and I began a discussion of false teachers and false teaching. False teaching is a SERIOUS matter to the church AND to God!

Heretical teaching {or false teaching} is teaching that intentionally distorts or contradicts God or the pure gospel as revealed in Scripture. Those who intentionally distort these things are for real called "heretics."

We can give specific examples of false teaching and even name false teachers {see Episode 26 & 27} until we're blue in the face. But we want to give you more than that. We desire that you be armed with discernment to recognize them online or in real life!

False teachers tend to share common character patterns and behaviors. Mind you, these are not good character qualities or behaviors! In today's episode, we go through nine of these characteristics and behaviors. I'm sure there are more...

We also walk through a few more Scriptures to better protect yourself from these wolves in sheep's clothing.

Join our Podcast+ Membership or login to your membership to download the transcripts, guided notes, Bible reading plans, and study tools from our podcast. Becoming a member also supports our work as we read, do, and tell the Word of the Lord!


*We have changed the name of our podcast! In August, I'll be moving everything over to my new discipleship website, Raising Rooted Disciples. 


Previous Podcast Episodes Related to this Episode:

 

Resources Mentioned or Related to this Episode:

 


Let's Connect!


SPEAKER_00

Welcome back to the podcast. I am Becky. This is Amy. Thank you all for joining us again. We just want to quickly remind you about the Podcast Plus membership. This is $5 a month and it gives you access to our Bible reading plans and the different resources that are created to help guide you through the lesson and the guided notes, which were another important tool. Absolutely. Keeps you on track so that you don't look back at your notes a couple weeks later and go, what did I learn?

SPEAKER_01

We have spent several episodes talking about false teaching and false teachers. We just want to remind you that we've been saying that teachers that are false intentionally distort or contradict God or the pure gospel that's been revealed in Scripture. And one of our last episodes, we really focused on false, the false God aspect, the false gospel aspect. And we did even call out some names. And I know people don't always love it when names are called, but Scripture calls out names. Paul calls out names. And so, but today we want to really zero a little bit more in on false teachers because really there are some patterns or some markers that you could most false teachers share. And so we can't name every false teacher in the book. And it could be helpful for you to have some things to think about as you maybe perhaps have a pastor in your life you listen to online, or a pastor of your church, or someone they're bringing in as a guest speaker, for you to kind of gauge could this be a false teacher? And so today we want to walk you through a few more scriptures. We've done a lot of scriptures so far, but a little more scripture, and we want to talk more about false teachers. So again, Jesus calls false teachers sheep, or he calls them wolves dressed as sheep, right? So here are three things, the first three. First, false teachers often will claim that they have a quote unquote secret knowledge. They'll often take a passage of scripture, a verse of scripture, and they may twist it. So that's one thing they may do. In 2 Peter 3, verse 15 and 16, we see Peter talking about this, but in verse 16 in particular, he says, he, meaning Paul, back in the neck in the previous verse, Paul speaks about these things in all his letters. There are some things hard to understand. The untaught, the unstable will twist them to their own destruction, as they also do with the rest of the scriptures. So in this verse, we see Peter saying that Paul's writing can be hard to understand. He calls it scripture, but he also says that these false teachers take these scriptures and they twist them. And oftentimes we see false teachers, there are passages, and we've talked about this in a previous episode, where the passage we're like, what does this mean? I don't understand this. And it may be we've done our research and different Bible scholars or they just don't agree on it and we're still confused about what does this mean? A lot of times false teachers will take that passage and they'll say, Oh, God has given me a special knowledge of what this means. And they're actually taking other scriptures, twisting them to make that scripture say something it really doesn't say. So we have to be really careful there. Another thing we see with false teachers is they essentially fake prophecies. They'll say, God told me, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. And I think if if I remember correctly, it was Billy Crone who kind of said, if someone walks up to you and says, God told me, he's like, run the other way. Doesn't, I don't believe that God is silent. He prompts us through his Holy Spirit, through reading his word. He can speak to us. But I think these teachers are faking prophecies really to their own gain, to gain followers. You can you can know that they're false when they don't come true, or what they speak leads you into sin, leads you into serious trouble. I think about the person who was told to marry somebody, he ended up being abusive to her. That was a fake prophecy. It was faked, and we know that. Their prophecies may even come true, but if their life does not reflect the life that is a godly life, they are a fake prophet. We see that in the Old Testament, even as well. The last thing on this part we would talk about is false teachers often focus on the experience. They don't really want you to think critically about things. They don't want you reading your Bible and really looking at context. Does it really say this? They want you to focus on experiencing God and the signs and the wonders and all those wonderful things that come through that, not having logic, not thinking biblically about things. And I think you have an example of that, Amy.

SPEAKER_00

So I didn't grow up Christian. Um, if you all have heard the testimony. So when I first understood that there was a God, I needed to seek who God was. I went to all kinds of different churches. And there was one church that I went to that focused on the gift of tongue. And they taught that you had to, you had to speak in tongue. That's how you knew you were saved. And so there would be hours dedicated at the end of a sermon during the church service where they would go, ask the Lord to speak in tongue. I can remember all the times I would go home and try and focus on in my prayer, it would be, Lord, allow me to speak in tongue, let me speak in tongue. And I then started to research what the word said. And so I pulled up in the back of my Bible to the glossary and looked up all the scriptures that were related to tongue or tongues and wrote them all down and then studied the context around those verses. And it became very clear to me that what scripture was teaching is the ability to speak in a tongue or a language, a dialect that is not one that you naturally know on your own. And so when I brought this to the attention of the first lady, because the pastor did not want to speak with me about it, he sent his mother, who was the first lady of the church, to talk to me. And when I presented everything that I had studied, she said to me, Well, let me give you this book that talks about some leader in the church that had a gathering in New York City, and in that gathering, they were all given the gift of speaking in tongues, and that was the legitimate proof for her that this is true. And I told her that I didn't want to read a book, I wanted her to walk me through scripture, and so she kind of brushed me off, and that was the last time I went to that church. Wow. Some other things that you may recognize in false teachers is that they have no humility or their humility is false. And if we go to scripture and you wonder, well, what does it look like to be humble or have a humility about the way that you live your life as a Christian? Um, we can see in Matthew 20, verse 28, it says, Just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life is a ransom for many. We can see that it's taking it's it's sacrificing yourself for the benefit of other people. And if we go to Philippians 2, 5, it also ties in the example that Jesus is to us for being humble. It says, have the same attitude in yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, because Christ is really our example of what we should aim to be like. He did not, as the scriptures say, come to be served. In the same church that I was at, where I had the issue with speaking in tongues, for the pastor that led the church, they did everything for him. They made sure he had a chair to sit in. They took the um the pulpit. The pulpit and they would put it in front of him and remove it from in front of him. They would take him his bottle of water, and when he wanted it, they would open the bottle of water for him. Wow. And that too was also like a signal that something isn't right. And then another characteristic would be uh related to repentance. So, or something has been brought to their attention and they are not repentant of it, they can figure out a way to explain to you why what they did was not wrong, or you have false repentance where something is brought to their attention and they may see that you took it the wrong way, and so they're saying, Oh, oh, I'm sorry that that offended you, instead of really focusing on what it is that they have done that is not right.

SPEAKER_01

And they may even repent for what you've brought to their attention, but they're not going to bring anything else up. They're gonna justify, give reasons for what they've done wrong. So there's it's that whole Mike Winger cover-up culture thing going on. They'll repent, quote unquote, for what you've exposed, but they're not going to give you anything else.

SPEAKER_00

Right. And then they're different in private than in public. I think that when you see the pastor in church, um, or even one that you see on the screen, right? That you're following his teaching online, when they're reading through the word or they're giving you some type of encouraging talk, it might be harder to tell about the one that's online, unless maybe you search through their Twitter feed or their Instagram and you're going, wow, what they're promoting or the things that they're saying, the reactions they have to maybe what's going on in the world or things that vacations that they're taking, I'm not sure, but the way that they're addressing it or communicating about it throws you off because it doesn't seem very biblical. Obviously, it is good to it is good to have a relationship with your pastor in your own church, not just to go to church and listen to him preach, but invite him and his wife and get to know them, invite them over for dinner or go out to dinner or something that allows you to have a relationship with him because this is the spiritual leader that you plan on submitting to as you continue to grow in your faith. Yeah, absolutely. And I don't want to just call out the pastors of a church. I think it's important for all your leaders of the church. If you have a Sunday school teacher for your children, go out to lunch with a Sunday school teacher, find activities that you can do together so that you have an opportunity to get to know who is leading your child in their in their faith and who your child may come to have a relationship with, like a really close-knit brother-sister relationship, um, who they may seek advice from. And even the deacons and the elders in the church, it's important. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

Another set of qualities, bad qualities, we would say, for false teachers is that they, I'm gonna go start with the bottom one, that they prey on the vulnerable. This will kind of feed into the others here, but it makes me think of 2 Timothy 3, and in the beginning of 2 Timothy 3, which we may have read in a previous episode on false teachers, but it kind of describes who they are. It describes in the end times who these people will be. But one of the things it says in verse 6 of 2 Timothy 3 is, for among them are those who worm their way into households and deceive gullible women, overwhelmed by sins and lead us and led astray by a variety of passions. And it continues to go on and it names some of these people in scripture as well. False teachers prey on the vulnerable. If you see someone who is struggling with something, struggling with a sin, a lot of times false teachers will prey on that in very disgusting ways that we're not going to get into today. So as they pray on the vulnerable, one of the things they do is they try to find people who they will that will completely depend on them. They want dependence on them. They don't want you depending on your logic or scripture or context or other people who might be calling them out. They want you depending on them and their knowledge. They also desire that you completely obey them, which is very scary, especially with these teachers making these false prophecies that sound good. They sound even biblical. They may use scripture to say God told me this or whatnot. But they want complete obedience to them. And those are not good places to be, right? Especially if they're false.

SPEAKER_00

You would want to ask yourself, especially as a new believer, what is it that you are seeking? So we can warn and we can provide examples of what to look for when it comes to how to detect something that is being taught that is incorrect and not according to what scripture says, or certain qualities and characteristics that you may find in a false teacher. There are several resources online that you can go to. Cosy Hens website for the gospel. You have Mike Winger, who has done an amazing job at walking you through testimonies of people who have lived through an abusive church culture. And you also have Alyssa Childers and Melissa Doherty. There's a lot of people. There's a lot of people. So there is not a lack of information that you can to find that gives you what you need to know, but really it is what are you doing to make sure that you're guarding yourself from falling into the trap of a false teacher? Can you explain the gospel? Can you say with confidence that Jesus is God? Do you know the promises that God gives to those who choose to pick up their cross and carry it every day? Are you looking for the showy stuff, the experience? Are you going after even an experience that a leader has had that says, God showed me this, or I was able to do this, or I was healed because of God's grace and his power, it could be true. But are you going after that, or are you going after your relationship with God?

SPEAKER_01

I even think of when the scribes and the Pharisees came to Jesus multiple times, but particularly here in Matthew 12, they come to him and say, Teacher, we want to see a sign from you. And of course, he knows their heart. He knows that they're evil, they're adulterous, he calls them this and says, I'll only show you the sign of Jonah, which would have been in the heart of the of the earth three days, and then he was resurrected. And the crazy thing is that sign was given to them and they still didn't believe. One of the things that we hear often talked about is are we seeking God's face or are we seeking his hand? Are we seeking the blessings? Is that where we're the signs and the wonders and the experience? Is that what we're seeking? Because if that's what we're seeking, we're gonna be vulnerable to the false teachers because that's also what they're seeking. We want to seek his face through his word. Colossians one and two are probably my two favorite chapters in the Bible. Well, I have a lot of others, but top ten, top ten favorite. In Colossians two, it's actually the verse I the verses I use for my raising rooted disciples. That's what I base my website off of. First, it says, beware of the false teaching and the empty philosophies that are in the world. And then it says to be rooted in Christ, be rooted in his word. And then again, it reminds us don't be deceived by the false philosophies of the world and the false teachers of the world. And I told Amy it's kind of like um an Oreo cookie where you the you've got the warning at the beginning and the warning at the end, but in the middle, it tells you what to do. And we don't want to just spend a whole episode um scaring you and making you fearful, like, oh, am I ever gonna fall? Pray for a false teacher. This scripture gives you things to do. It doesn't just say, for example, take off or put off the flesh. It tells you to put on the spirit. So we're not just telling you things not to do. We want to tell you what you should do because scripture is very clear. We are to be rooted in Christ. We are to be rooted in the word.

SPEAKER_00

And from experience, um, when I began my journey with Jesus, I did seek a lot of things that were showy, not necessarily because of the because I wanted the show, but because I thought my understanding was that if the Holy Spirit that lives in you could raise Jesus from the dead, then I should be able to do all of these things. I mean, I have a list, I will not say it, but a list of people that their books that I would read, the videos I would watch, conferences that I went to, and I would see just so much emotion, and and I was like, I want that too. And God knows your heart. So when you are truly seeking Him, there is nothing that is happening that is not on purpose. So there are things that God will allow you to experience that bring you into a deeper and closer relationship with Him because going through what the world teaches and what false teachers want you to experience, going through that makes you realize even more how dependent you need to be on God's word and what he says and not what other people say. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01

I say it sometimes to my kids, we're all one step away from stupid. So we must be on guard. Peter tells us this in 2 Peter 3, 17 through 18, when he writes, therefore, dear friends, since you know this in advance, and what he what you know in advance is that they're gonna twist scripture, be on your guard so that you are not led away by the error of lawless people and fall from your own stable position. But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be the glory, both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. So let's be determined as Ezra to read, do, and tell the word of the Lord. Amen.

Head Shot

Becky Spence

Host