Jesus warns in Matthew 7 that the most dangerous kind of false teaching comes from one dressed like a sheep. By the time you realize there’s a wolf underneath, it’s frighteningly close. How do we keep alert when such sounds deceptively good?
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The pastor uses David Freese’s decision to decline his Hall of Fame nomination as an example of looking beyond momentary accomplishments to examine the overall character and fruit of a person’s life. How do you apply this principle when evaluating teachers, leaders, or influencers you follow? What “fruits” do you look for, and how do you avoid being swayed by a single impressive moment?
Jesus says we will recognize false prophets by their fruits (Matthew 7:15–16). What specific fruits—attitudes, actions, or outcomes—should we look for when assessing teaching we encounter online, in books, or even in our own church? What makes this difficult when teaching sounds very Christian on the surface?
The sermon warns that some of the most dangerous teaching affirms parts of Scripture and sounds biblically sound, yet ultimately produces division, anger, or self-righteousness rather than love for God and neighbor. Can you think of examples (without naming names) where something seemed true at first but led people further from Christ? What warning signs were present?
Why do you think Jesus uses both the “tree and fruit” metaphor and the “wolf in sheep’s clothing” metaphor? How do they complement each other in helping us stay alert to false teaching—and why does Jesus insist the tree be cut down rather than simply avoided?
The sermon emphasizes that faithful teachers model repentance and humility, and warns against following those who claim special spiritual insight others lack—including those who use current events to authenticate themselves. How does this challenge our culture’s desire to feel “in the know”? What would it look like to respond to suffering in the world with humble service rather than claims of prophetic insight?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Last week we thought about the narrow gate and the wide gate, the calling in the Christian life to be those who seek after the narrow gate. Yes, the narrow gate—it sounds counterintuitive. The wide gate would be easier, wouldn’t it? And yes, of course it would. But isn’t right. Tonight, we’re going to be thinking sort of along the same lines. We’re going to be thinking about false teachers, the false prophets—those who say things that sound appealing, often sound easier than what we know we should do, and so we feel drawn into them.
Even if we’ve been in church a very long time, even if we study God’s Word quite a bit, we can find ourselves being pulled into these forces, these callings from the world that sound so appealing. Sometimes we don’t know quite what to do. Jesus offers us insight into how we should measure teaching, how we should measure what we run into in the world. Is it good? Is it bad? Well, Jesus is going to address that, and as we think about that tonight, I need you to excuse me for a moment because I’m still kind of in mourning.
We are in the midst of October, and I don’t have any Cardinals baseball to talk about. I’m talking about the Cardinals a little more than usual because you have to understand, if you’re not a baseball fan, this is October in St. Louis, and the Cardinals aren’t playing. That hurts.
So let me relive a favorite moment from a past postseason, thinking about… If you’re a Cardinals fan, you already know where I’m probably going to go. I’m going to talk about the 2011 World Series Game Six and what do we have? We have David Freese hitting the key home runs that clinched the series. This changes everything. In that moment, as the ball hit his bat and went flying out into what they now call “Freese Landing” in the stadium—I mean, if you have a part of the stadium named after you, you probably done something significant, right? And so, it wasn’t called that before; it wasn’t named after him—the place is named after him because he hit those balls. He changed the series from one that looked certain to go against St. Louis to a series that made the St. Louis Cardinals 11-time World Series champions. It was amazing. It was just utterly amazing.
I’ve heard that game on replay multiple times, and I still get excited listening to it. It’s so great. Logically, several years later, we’re now—what? 12 years later. David Freese was nominated to join the Cardinals Hall of Fame, a wonderful institution they’ve set up to honor great Cardinals of the past. Many of these men in the Cardinals Hall of Fame weren’t just great athletes. They also were great examples.
For example, I’ve talked on Monday night a little bit about Adam Wainwright, who just retired this past weekend—the great pitcher, but also a great man of God, a man who has spoken very clearly about his faith and the hope that he finds in Jesus. That’s often the kind of person that we find in the Cardinals Hall of Fame: people who sought very clearly not just to be the best at their sport, but to be people who exemplified what we’re called to be as human beings.
So, David Freese was nominated for joining the Hall of Fame, and he did something that I’ve never heard someone do before—he turned it down.
Now, if I were nominated to be in the Hall of Fame for anything, I don’t think I’d turn it down. I mean, who would nominate me for the Hall of Fame for anything? I’m not going to be nominated for a Hall of Fame. And so, I mean, it’s amazing to think—imagine whatever you’re good at, whatever you’re passionate about—imagine that someone, or actually a group of people, a whole fan base, voted and nominated you because they think that you are that great, that you should be in the Hall of Fame. Turn it down? I saw a little video clip right at the end of the season, and he was down at the Double-A Springfield Cardinals, our minor league affiliate, and he was talking before the game. He was being interviewed about this decision, and he reflected back on 2011. He said, “I don’t deserve it.”
Why didn’t he deserve it? Well, he said, “I was drinking too much. I was driving recklessly. I had gotten in accidents. I was letting the prestige go to my head. I was not an example of the Cardinal way. I was not living up to what it meant to be a Cardinal. These other men, these men I grew up respecting and honoring and idolizing, wanting to be like—they weren’t like me.” So, “I shouldn’t be in there. That one moment in October doesn’t define a career worthy of being in the Hall of Fame.”
Now, I hear that and think, okay, now you’re a guy that should be in the Hall of Fame because you get it. But that’s beside the point for the moment. I think what we really should focus on is to think about what he’s saying. He’s saying it matters more than if, in the moment, I do the thing that you really want me to do. It matters if I’m actually living the sort of life I should be living.
A lot of times, as Christians, as human beings, what do we do? We look for the person who’s accomplishing something in the moment that we would like accomplished. We look for the person who is saying the things that we want to hear. We look for the person who is advocating for us, and we don’t really take any time to think about—is this person actually doing what God has called them to do?
The Cardinals fans know that Freese was having some trouble in 2011. Yeah, you could read the paper, and you saw he got in a car accident. There were some whispers about maybe he was drinking too much. On that day in October, we weren’t really thinking about that; we were thinking about, “Wow, here’s a legend.” We know he’s a legend right now. We don’t think about that not going to be down the road. We figure out if he’s a legend: he’s a legend right now because he has just determined whether we win the World Series or not.
And too often, in all sorts of places in life, that’s the approach we take. I think we could do a lot to learn from David Freese on that. More than that, we could do a lot to learn from Jesus on that, who speaks of these very things. So let’s come before God, ask for His guidance, and then we’ll dig.
Father, we struggle to understand what is good. I struggle to understand what is good. You have said over and over what is good, what you call us to do, which is to love You and to love our neighbors, to walk humbly before You. Lord, would You help us to see those places where we fall short, for those that we lift up and put on pedestals fall short? And instead of that, that we might keep our eye completely fixed on You, that we would keep ourselves grounded in Your Word. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
So we fail to discern properly, and that comes in the place of teaching as well. We do teaching in the church. We do teaching here at Little Hills. We have Bible study on Tuesday night. We have, of course, sermons and devotionals, and we have times of confession, which is a teaching time too. If you think about it, we’re teaching each other to confess. We’re helping each other to probe each other’s hearts and say, “Have I fallen short of what I’m supposed to do in this place or that place?”
There are a lot of people in this world, whether they claim to be preachers or teachers, whether they come to be Christians or not, there are a lot of people in this world, a lot of things in this world that are trying to teach us. Here’s what Jesus says about teaching in Matthew 7:15. If you want to turn in your Bible with me, He says: “Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You’ll recognize them by their fruits. Are 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.”
So we get a botany lesson, right? What is Jesus trying to tell us here? The easy thing that we could say would be, “Well, you shouldn’t follow bad teaching.” Yeah, right. Come on, don’t follow bad teaching. Okay, everybody. We good now? Well, the problem is we don’t usually think that bad teaching is bad.
Yeah, there’s the obvious bad teaching; you can find the examples, and now with the internet, you can find them a whole lot easier. You can go online, and I could start googling something, and within moments, I could provide you with all kinds of examples of really bad teaching about all sorts of things. And we could find that and say, “Okay, here’s bad teaching.” Okay, Jesus said not to follow bad teaching. I found an example of bad teaching. I’m not going to follow it. I shouldn’t walk out into a busy intersection without looking both ways. Easy, right? No problem.
What does Jesus say about wolves and sheep’s clothing? It’s a cliché now; we use that; we don’t even think about it. But what is Jesus talking about here? Jesus is talking about things that we learn, things that we often aren’t even thinking about. We just sort of soak them up in the world that sound really, really good. They sound innocent. It’s comforting, nice, and wooly and soft, friendly, but really devouring.
Here’s the thing, friends, that we need to be aware of: there are many who claim the name of Jesus, who teach in the name of Jesus, who teach with great authority in the name of Jesus, who fall into this category. Sounding Christian isn’t enough. You can sound Christian really relatively easily.
There have been documented cases; there was a documentary some years back where a man who had renounced his faith went around; he still knew all the right words, and so he went around, and he could rally up a crowd. He could make it look like miracles were happening; he could do all this stuff, and he didn’t believe any of it. But he knew what to say.
And there are an awful lot of people that know what to say, not just in the church, but in the church as well. We need to be aware that whether we’re in the church, whether we’re out of the church, whether we’re listening to our television or a radio, reading a book, a magazine, whatever we might be doing, there are going to be things that sound really good—things that even affirm what we believe are strong moral principles, things that even seem to affirm the Word of God itself, but they’re actually leading us further and further away from what it means to be a faithful person.
Things that are dangerous. Things that will hurt us and hurt others.
Later on in Matthew, Jesus curses the olive tree. Have you ever wondered about that? If you’ve read through the Gospels, you’ve run into this story, and I always feel sorry for this olive tree. Jesus is going along, and they’re traveling, and He comes up to this olive tree, and He’s hungry. So He goes to pick some olives. That’d be pretty neat, actually. I’ve never been by an olive tree with fruit on it. I actually got a little olive tree a few weeks ago. Aldi had them for sale. I thought, “Oh, this would be kind of neat,” and it pretty quickly withered up and died. So I’ll never know if it was neat, I suppose, but how neat it would be to walk up to these olive trees and just pick some olives off of it.
Well, Jesus goes up to this olive tree. There aren’t any olives on it. So what does He do? He curses the tree, and it dies. What does Jesus say? It’s not producing good fruit. It’s not producing, and so it’s going to be thrown away.
And that’s what Jesus uses as a metaphor here as well—this idea of a tree that doesn’t produce good fruit. What Jesus wants us to understand—this is important—is that it’s important that our lives are fruitful. It isn’t just enough to sound Christian. It’s not enough to be the olive tree sitting there on the hill looking all beautiful with lots of leaves. You need to actually produce fruit.
We need to produce fruit. Those whom we listen to and we follow need to produce fruit. It isn’t enough just to sound that way.
Here’s the question I need to ask myself, and I believe that we all need to ask ourselves: Does what I teach, that’s what I read, does what I share, does what I follow produce good fruit? When I am listening to the voices I like to allow into my head, is it causing me to love people better? Is it causing me to love God better? Are those the two things that are happening?
Does it make me angry and hateful towards people? Does it make me want to just be in a dour, horrible mood? Does it make me feel unhopeful even as I’m allegedly hearing about hope? And I need to run.
Too often, though, we take it in because it feels like it’s being productive. Ah, okay now I know who the bad people are. I know who the bad teachers are.
Here’s the thing that’s kind of hard for us sometimes to get our minds around, but oftentimes, the very people who are out there warning us about bad teaching are the bad teachers.
Now you’re saying, “Hmm, so Tim is talking about bad teachers today. He just said that sometimes the bad teachers are warning about bad teachers. Maybe I better back away and get out of here.”
Well, hold on. Let’s see where we can go with this. We need to check ourselves, we need to check each other, we need to check me. We need to hold each other accountable. We need to hold to what is actually good and true.
Most of you know that I like to play with computer technology as a sort of hobby. At one point I actually thought that was going to be my calling in life, and I still like to do it as a hobby. I am a certified geek; I’m not afraid to admit that. Amongst other things, I’ve written the content management system, the code that runs our website here at Little Hills. It’s all written from scratch. I didn’t go and buy some code and add something on to it. I wanted to totally geek out and build it from the ground up.
When it was too slow, I didn’t think, “Well, I’ll give up and go buy something.” Then I thought, “I’m going to rebuild it from the ground up.” So I’ve done that, and I was feeling very pleased with myself because what I accomplished a few years ago during the pandemic—I had some time, sitting around at home—what could I do that would be useful? Oh, I know, I’ll speed this thing up. I made it go about ten times faster than it was going before. I was feeling really good about this.
And then I discovered a little, just a little bitty small detail—sometimes when you went and loaded the website, I host a number of websites for our ministry and for some other ministries, sometimes when you went to our website it would pull up a different website. It loaded really fast, but it wasn’t the right site.
You can say, “Well, it looks really good. I mean, look at those speed charts. It’s going like crazy, going so fast.” But here’s the thing about that: it wasn’t good because it wasn’t loading what it was supposed to. If you go to Little Hills Church to find out when we have church services or Bible study or whatever, and you do that and instead you discover a site that you’re not even sure what the connection is to Little Hills, maybe it’s not even in the same state. It doesn’t do you a lot of good. That’s bad fruit.
So that tree needed to be chopped out. It needed to be fixed. It needed to repent of its sinful site ways. It showed a problem in its core, and I’m not joking. It was in the core of the code, the thing that figured out what was supposed to be displayed. There was this mechanism that didn’t work right. It looked really good. I thought my code was really clean, but it didn’t engage properly, so it would just not pick the right site. We did it randomly. It took me forever to find it, but the core was bad. It needed to be fixed.
Oftentimes what we see in teaching is the core is bad. It looks really good. All the speed charts are going great. You hear this teaching. Maybe you find a preacher online that you’re listening to throughout the week, and he is just nailing it. “Wow, look at this truth that is in here. He’s finally telling what all those other people aren’t saying. He is just bringing God’s Word home. Listen to that preaching.”
And maybe he is. We need to actually see if the core is good. Sometimes our gut reaction isn’t very accurate. Sometimes our initial emotional reaction isn’t all that accurate. What it is is we’re scrolling down social media, and we run across this reel, and this reel is just nailing exactly what we’re angry about at the moment.
You need to look at the fruit.
Luke 6:43, Jesus, this is a parallel statement that Jesus makes, He says: “For no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit, for each tree is known by its own fruit. For things are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush.
The good person,” this is the part that He adds in this particular time through this, and He’s talking about, He says, “The good person, out of the good treasure of his heart, produces good; and the evil person, out of the evil treasure, produces evil; for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.”
That’s what Jesus is getting to when He talks about good fruit and bad fruit, because while I am no expert in growing an orchard, if your tree in your orchard has rotten roots, there have been pests in the ground, they’re eating away the roots—what’s going to happen to that tree? It’s going to fall over. It’s going to die. It is going to die, and it’s not going to produce good fruit.
If we look at how Jesus words in Matthew, He actually uses two different terms for bad. We don’t see that in the English, but in one, He’s using the word that’s appropriate to talk about a decaying tree—a rotten tree. There are insects in it, they’re eating it away, the branches are falling off, the leaves are yellowing. This is a dying tree. It’s not going to produce good fruit. It’s producing some fruit for a little while, but it’s not going to take you to where you want to go ultimately.
So it is with teaching. It can look really good in the moment. What we need to do is look at two things when we examine teaching, whether it’s what I’m teaching, whether it’s what you’re teaching others, we should always ask ourselves—be introspective of that—whether it’s someone we encounter online or in a book or on television or wherever it might be. What do we need to do? We need to ask: “Well, is it true? Or is the person saying true things? And then also, what kind of fruit is that person producing with what he or she is saying?”
Verses 19 to 20 once again: “Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will recognize them by their fruits.”
Let me ask you a question. Why does Jesus get so into cutting down the trees? If one tree isn’t producing good fruit, just walk away from it. If a bad teacher is in the church and it’s not so good, you just don’t listen anymore, right? Just fall asleep during the sermon—no problem.
Think about it. Why does Jesus make such a big deal out of it? Why should we care so much? Live and let live. If someone else has a different view of things, don’t worry about it.
Here’s what Jesus wants us to understand: it’s more than just choosing not to pick the fruit, saying, “Well, I don’t need that fruit.” Why does He want the church to be worried about this as He’s instructing His disciples? Here’s what you need to understand. Why does He say it needs to be cast out? The tree needs to be chopped down.
Because it’s an act of threat. That’s why He uses two metaphors here. He doesn’t just use the tree metaphor because I’ve had a tree before. A beloved tree; I could think of several examples that died over time. I didn’t necessarily go and feel like it needed to be chopped down while it was dying. Eek out the last years of its existence, enjoy it for however long you can.
Why chop it down in this case? Especially if the teaching is sort of affirming things that we like, and maybe some of it’s true. “Okay, yes, this pastor doesn’t always teach well, but this teaching is so good. Let’s just hold on to that.”
Why does Jesus say it’s such a big deal? Well, that’s where He switches to the metaphor of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. What He wants us to understand is, sure, if there’s a fruit tree that all the fruit on it is rotten, I don’t have to pick that rotten fruit and stick it in my mouth. I can see the worms coming out of it; I don’t need to eat that.
But if someone—if I’m a sheep, and there’s a flock of sheep, and there’s this one sheep that kind of moves a little differently, I don’t realize it, but that sheep is actually a wolf with a bunch of wool wrapped around him. By the time I realize there’s a problem, he’s biting me on the neck and killing me.
Oftentimes, when it comes to teaching, what happens is that we let this in. It sounds pretty good, and we’re not trying to be discerning at first because it sounds good. It hits the right buttons. It hits the things that we already care about, and so we affirm it. We don’t realize that the teacher is using this to get closer and closer until he can chomp down on us.
So we need to actually examine; we need to actually take this seriously. It matters. And it’s revealed in deeds. You need to look at how those who teach live.
Now, let’s be very clear. Every pastor, every Bible teacher, every devotional giver—even the best—are flawed, sinful human beings. Unless you’ve found a time machine and you’re going back and listening to Jesus, everyone else is going to have things you shouldn’t emulate, areas that are bad, blind spots, things to improve on.
What are you looking for? You’re looking for someone whose overall example of life is moving towards loving neighbor and loving God; being faithful to God’s Word; being willing to repent when wrong.
Because here’s something we don’t hear often enough in the church: we don’t hear those who teach repent often enough. Why is it that we have confession every week? And why is it that, as we do that, if Jim is doing it, if I’m doing it, if anyone in here is doing it, we rotate around, whomever it is that’s doing it. Melanie led last week. Why? Why do we do that? Why don’t we say, “Well, you need to repent of this”? Why do we need to repent of this? Why does it come back to examples that involve us? Well, because we’re all in this.
And one of the key signs that you’re dealing with a wolf in sheep’s clothing is if it’s you—all of us are in this.
Run from the person who says that he or she is above all that and is just helping everybody else get to it. We need to look at their deeds. We need to look at how the person lives.
Because what we can find is too often there are people who can say all the right boxes, tick all the checkboxes on the list of orthodoxy. “I am a verified authenticated Bible teacher; that says all the right stuff,” but isn’t living the right life, isn’t living in a way that points people to God, even imperfectly.
Sometimes that’s the only sign that we see for a very long time. I’ve been around the church long enough; you probably know examples of this. I certainly can. I’m not going to name names at all; that’s not my point today, but I know examples that fall into this category—people who, for a long time, everything that was being said by that person sounded so faithful, sounded so true, but you’d see the little cracks. The cracks in how they lived.
They’re not living that way—not in the sense that we’re all imperfect, but in the sense that you start to really get the sense: I’m sensing this person’s true character. They’re really this way behind the scenes when no one knows what they’re saying. This is how they are.
You can say that about somebody, and it doesn’t match how they are when they’re in front of people. And not just in the sense that “Okay, so I might be a little goofier when I’m not up here”—whoa, that’s scary. I just heard a little “yeah,” a lot goofier, you know? I mean, there’s different ways we might behave because this is a serious place here as we study God’s Word. I’m going to be a little more serious than in certain other settings.
But if you see a dramatic difference in how the person lives, if you see a dramatic difference in how I live and how I am up here, run. Sometimes I wish I’d run a little faster. We need to run.
Here’s another thing that we have to watch out for because what do false teachers do? They might spout off a lot of good-sounding things that either fit what culture and society say or what they’ve got the Word of God says. And so it covers up how they’re handling their own lives in the background.
But then they’ll also oftentimes do something else, and that is to find a way to fulfill their claims, look, create self-fulfilling prophecies.
So Jesus talks about false prophets here, and sometimes it’s looking at something, looking at some kind of current event in our world, and they say, “You know, I have a feeling things are going this way. I’m going to say that, and it’s going to make me look really smart, and then people are going to listen to me.”
Sometimes it’s much more at a local level. Maybe someone who says, “Well, this person over here in the church isn’t very good,” and you’re going to see them misbehave, and then the false teacher provokes them into misbehaving. Entrapment, they’d call it if it were a matter of police rather than pastors.
What happens? They seem to authenticate themselves, and so we listen more.
We need to listen, and we need to look to listen to what people are saying. Make sure they’re actually saying what’s true according to God’s Word, but also make sure the person is living in a way that is loving and caring and focused on Christ.
Second Timothy 2:18, Paul talks about several people who have swerved from the truth, saying that the resurrection has already happened. They’re upsetting the faith of some.
And what’s He saying here? Well, there were false teachers in the church. As Paul is writing to Timothy, they were trying to authenticate themselves, trying to put themselves above the apostles like Paul and say, “You should really listen to us.”
How do they do that? They said, “Paul is still preaching that Jesus is going to come again someday, but the resurrection has already happened.”
The resurrection of the dead has already happened. He’s already lifted up the saints who are truly faithful.
And over time, this happened time and again. Surprisingly, it’s in there, but people have done this again and again to say, “Well, Jesus has really returned. Jesus has really lifted up His church. You just didn’t realize it.”
And it’s some weird theological version of the Emperor’s New Clothes where they say, “Well, can’t you see it? The spiritual people can see that Jesus has returned. Can’t you see? Something, they point out, something has changed in this world—some absurd little thing—and so clearly Jesus has returned. And if you saw that, you’d understand that Jesus has returned, and all the spiritual people see that Jesus has returned. Don’t you see it?” And the people, and, well, I guess I don’t want to be unspiritual.
Friends, we’re going to have this problem over the next few weeks. We just prayed earlier in the service for Israel. And I’m not a prophet; I’m not a son of a prophet; I’m not saying this so you can say, “Oh wow, Tim really is a prophet now; I need to listen to him.” Quite the opposite, I’m not a prophet. I’m not a prophet. I’m not a prophet.
But it happens over and over again, so I can make a pretty educated guess here.
Over the next weeks, we’re going to see people who are going to look at this conflict going on; they’re going to talk about the end of the world, and they’re going to try to connect the prophecies that we find in Scripture.
“Here is what’s going on in Israel right now, and here’s what the faithful need to do. Listen to me about everything else that I’m talking about, and you need to give money to my ministry. You need to give my ministry power and prestige.”
It’s going to happen. Examine the fruit.
Because we don’t need to find someone who has some convoluted insight into prophecy to explain what’s happening in Israel. We live in a fallen world where fallen people do awful things to other people. And what do we do? What’s our responsibility when fallen people do awful things to other fallen people? We as fallen people try to muster the best we can by God’s grace, and we try to help those who are being harmed.
We don’t need any weird interpretation to explain that. Run from those who feel like you do.
What happens when people start making all these interpretations to authenticate themselves? If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he’s puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among the people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain.
See, it’s nothing new; it’s been happening from the beginning. And the thing is, we don’t need any secret insight; God’s Word is right there.
What do we do when people are being hurt? We help them.
What do we do tonight? We prayed, and we should keep praying, and we should seek ways that we can help. This is a horrible thing, friends, that’s going on, and you don’t need any weird interpretation for it. You just need to look at hurting human beings that are over there in Israel being bombed.
Being bombed by an organization who says its sole purpose is to wipe them off the face of the earth. It’s not hard.
What do we do? We pray, we serve, we do what we can. But why is it easier to go ahead and go with the interpretation? Well, then it makes us feel like we’re in the know.
Does anyone here like to feel like you’re in the know on things? Anyone? Yeah, a few? Yeah, a couple? Yeah, okay. Yeah.
I know all of you really do, and some of you feel like you’re more in the know if you don’t put your hand up to say you like to be in the know, because really, in-the-know people don’t need to say it, right?
We like to think that we’re in the know. Those people that say, “If you just listen to me, I’ll give you special insight,” they say, “Well, you can be one of the ones who’s in the know.”
And what does that often do? It justifies us. Then we can act differently towards the people who aren’t in the know. We don’t have to love them. We don’t have to treat them kindly. We can treat them as the stupid, backward people that they are.
Right? Oh boy. Only they do, but they don’t.
What does Jesus say? That that leads us to destruction.
Ironically, as these people think that they are building themselves up, ironically, as we follow false teachers and we think we’re building ourselves up, what are we really doing? We’re taking ourselves right back to that wide gate of verse 13 that we talked about last week: “Enter by the narrow gate, for the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many.”
God doesn’t want sort of close teachers—the teachers that say an awful lot of true stuff about His Word but find ways to manipulate it to build themselves up. God doesn’t want sort of close teachers that even say absolutely everything right but have no regard to actually living it out in the love of Christ.
If you know a teacher that you love to read the writings of or hear the sermons of or the instruction in some other way, and that person isn’t modeling Jesus’s love, how in the world is that person actually teaching well?
That’s the easy part, friends. Not easy to do, but the easy part to know we need to do.
Because what does Jesus do? Jesus loves us. Jesus came into the world—all of us messed up people, all of us who aren’t in the know, all of us who constantly do things wrong. And what did He do? He loved us enough to die for us. He died for you and me, even if you are really messed up now, like me.
Isaiah 5:1-7:
“Let me sing for my beloved my song, my love song concerning His vineyard. My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill. He dug it and cleared it of stones and planted it with choice vines. He built a watchtower in the midst of it and hewed out a wine vat in it. And he looked for it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.
And now, inhabitants of Jerusalem and men of Judah, judge between Me and My vineyard: What more was there to do for My vineyard that I have not already done in it? When I looked for it to yield grapes, why did it yield wild grapes?
And I will tell you what I will do to My vineyard: I will remove its hedge. I shall break it down; it shall be devoured. I will break down its wall, and it shall be trampled down. I’ll make it a waste. It shall not be pruned or hoed, and briars and thorns shall grow up. I will also command the clouds that rain no rain upon it.
For the vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the men of Judah His pleasant plantings. And He looked for justice, but behold, bloodshed; for righteousness, but behold an outcry.”
Notice what the Lord says there. He convicts His people as He convicts us. What does He say? He looks for what we do. Not enough to say that we’re God’s people; He wants us to actually want to live as God’s people.
What are we leaving behind? What’s our wake, so to speak? You know, if you’re in a boat and it leaves a wake behind it—what’s the wake that we’re leaving behind us? What’s the wake of the teachers that we follow leaving behind them? Are they leaving a path of discord and destruction like Paul talks about? Are they leaving a path that heals?
That doesn’t mean they just affirm everything people say and make them feel really good. It means that they’re actually helping people to be more like Jesus, but they’re doing it because they actually love the people.
What are you going to see? You’re going to see people that don’t necessarily always agree with them. You’re going to see people that sometimes think that they’re wrong-headed. But you’re also going to see people, even people that disagree with them, that say, “I don’t necessarily agree with that person, but I do feel loved.”
That’s exactly what God does for us.
God loves us even when we don’t get it. Because He loves us even when we don’t get it, He draws us in. Draws us into Himself so that we can get it.
Too often in life, we look at part of the ingredients, but not all the ingredients.
Who here likes sour cream? Let’s do a survey. Anyone like sour cream? I really like sour cream. I love it on, especially Mexican food—nachos, tacos, burritos. Oh, it’s so good on potato soup.
Yeah, I’m sorry. I won’t do this to you much longer, but just imagine a nice bowl of potato soup with sour cream and cheese and bacon on it. Doesn’t that sound good? Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Now, I also like lots of things with whipped cream on it. What’s good with whipped cream on it? Nothing. You don’t like whipped cream? Okay. Someone else is saying pumpkin pie. Yes. Kayla needs to be worked on. She doesn’t understand the glory of pumpkin pie. How about ice cream? Ice cream’s good with it on any kind of pie. Hot chocolate? Oh yeah. Yeah. Banana split? You have to have whipped cream.
Now, what if I said, “Now, whipped cream and sour cream, they’re both made of cream.” And I said, “Well, let’s just put some sour cream on my pumpkin pie. Sour cream on my ice cream sundae. Okay, how about sour cream on my hot chocolate?” Am I making anyone…
You try it and let me know how it goes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds awful.
They’re both cream. They both have that one feature. Just like oftentimes we find teachers who have a lot of good things to say, but that sour cream is missing something. It’s not sweetened. It’s not pleasant in that context. It’s a very savory thing. It’s good in its own spot, but it’s not right on hot chocolate, for example.
And too often, too often, what we do is we look at part of something, we say, “Ah, it has cream in it. I’ll go ahead and drink it. I’ll go ahead and put it on my hot chocolate.”
What we need to do is ask, “Is it really actually what it’s supposed to be? It’s supposed to be whipped cream, not sour cream.”
Partway isn’t enough.
So, as we seek to follow God, we need to seek to follow Him in both His truth and His doctrine, and also indeed, we need to seek people who do that—not perfectly, but faithfully, determinedly because they love Jesus. Because we love Jesus. May that be who we are.
Let us pray.
Father, would You help us to be those who cling to Your truth, that seek Your truth, but also, very importantly, live it? We love people. We love You. We love the people around us. And so, as we share that truth, we do it out of love. We do it because we care about people. We do it compassionately and empathetically. We don’t do it to score points, nor do we want to be associated with those that do.
Would You help us to have our hearts directed towards You, Your glory, and Your love? We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.
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