Sermon – Purity of Doctrine Oct. 23, 2005

Faith-Wolves
Mat 7:15
Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves.

The wolves circled excitedly within their pack, bared their fangs, nipped one another, and set up howling. It was a pre-feeding ritual. For days, they had stalked a flock of sheep and measured each animal. Finally, at a stealth trot they separated out a lame ram. What appeared to be a snarling frenzy was choreographed murder. Yellow eyes glared, lips curled, throats growled all just out of reach of the lowered horns. It was a ploy of distraction. The appointed killer slipped up behind, pounced on the haunches, and pulled the sheep down. Before there was a bleat for help, the pack was gorging on their victim.

I know some grandmotherly people involved in the blackest of treacheries. They go about dragging human souls into hell with their words. They are false teachers. However, these purveyors of heresy are mere pawns. The true carnivores of faith are the demons who prompt false teachers. They salivate with desire to sink their teeth of untruth into our faith and pull us down, below life. These beasts track humans looking for those with weak or deformed knowledge of Christ. They know a frontal attack against faith itself will not succeed. Instead, they sneak up behind with false teaching about Jesus. Missing faith and misapplied faith have the same conclusion: spiritual death.

I am not interested in wearing a target on my backside advertising the message ‘pounce here.’ I’d rather the wolves looked at me and moved on because they saw an informed, healthy faith. Having faith is not enough. To be strong and agile it must be faith based on truth about Jesus. We are not abandoned to the spiritual conjectures of humans—though the world is rife with such. We have a rich and beautiful objective source in the Bible. The Holy Scriptures alone capture the teachings of Christ and the resurrection validates His truth. Our only hope against the faith-wolves is to nourish our faith on the real Jesus.

Acts 20:29-31
I know that after I leave, savage wolves will come in among you and will not spare the flock. 30 Even from your own number men will arise and distort the truth in order to draw away disciples after them. 31 So be on your guard!

I am not worried about faith-wolves getting into this church after I leave. I trust your elders completely to ensure you receive accurate teaching. What I worry about is what happens when families move on, teens go off to college, or we mix with other so-called Christians who in reality are faith-wolves. They are out there, all around us. It is common to find teachers in the main-line Protestant denominations who deny the authority of scripture. Cults of Christianity send out workers with magazines and spiels for luring in the unaware. I imagine each of us has been targeted at one time or another. If I sound like an alarmist, it is because the wolves have overcome people I love. Like us, they started well then shipwrecked their faith.

1 Tim 1:18-2:1
18 Timothy, my son, I give you this instruction in keeping with the prophecies once made about you, so that by following them you may fight the good fight, 19 holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith.

1 Tim 6:20-21
20 Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, 21 which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith.

Repeatedly Paul and Jesus urgently warned us against false teaching:

2 Tim 4:2-4
2 Preach the Word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage-with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.

One Path
One of the most popular myths of our day is the doctrine of ‘many paths’. It is popular to teach that Jesus is one of many ways to God. These are faith-wolves speaking. Listen to the Bible on this subject:

John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

John 10:1
10:1 "I tell you the truth, the man who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate, but climbs in by some other way, is a thief and a robber.

John 10:7-9
7 Therefore Jesus said again, "I tell you the truth, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who ever came before me were thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved.

Acts 4:12
Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.

When we teach Christ as the only way we are viewed as prideful exclusivists. But the universe does not operate according to man’s childish opinions. Let’s look at this subject from God’s point of view. God created the universe through Jesus, He said it was good, and blessed it. Man promptly sinned and corrupted everything. Then God turned to Jesus, this part of Himself with so much splendor and glory that the entire universe was held in His hand, and He said to this Glory, “I want You to become a helpless infant, grow up as a human, and die a treacherous death on their behalf.”

It tore God’s heart to ask glorious Jesus to do this but it had to be done. Jesus agreed and together they went through the heartache of the incarnation, death, and resurrection. Then God held out this indescribable gift to man as the means of forgiveness of his sins and man turned up his nose and said, “No thanks, I’ll find my own way.”

I ask you, is it God who is the proud exclusionist or is it man? It is man; not to mention he is also ungrateful and blind.

Beware of the doctrine of many paths. It will get you into hell.

Types of Wolves
Here are a few other faith-wolves in sheep’s clothing to watch out for:

-Cults
-Cults of Christianity
-Occult
-New-age

Let’s quickly run down this list.

First - cults:

-Do not accept the deity of Christ
-Works-based salvation
-Source of authority other than the Bible

Many cults have no claim of a connection to Christ, such as Buddhism or Hinduism. However, there are many more who do claim Jesus. These are called cults of Christianity. It is a better term than Christian cults because that is an oxymoron. These are probably the most dangerous to you and me. They give lip service to salvation in Christ alone but, like other cults, they un-deify Christ and focus on good works to get us into heaven.

The Occult is usually more honest in where they claim to get their power; from Satan. But sometimes occultists, too, dress in sheep’s clothing. I dated a girl in high school who first told me she used only white magic, but when I broke up with her she put a curse on me. I think that is why my hair is thinning today.

Finally, there is the New Age Movement—which really isn’t so new. In fact, all these heresies were around in the first century and are openly refuted in the New Testament.


New Age -- One or more of the following beliefs:

-All is one, all reality is part of the whole;
-Everything is God and God is everything;
-Man is God or a part of God;
-Reincarnation;
-Man can create his own reality and/or values through transformed consciousness or altered states of consciousness.

Misapplied Faith
As we said at the beginning of this message, the danger in all these false teachings is not that we would drop faith altogether, but that our faith would be misapplied to something other than Jesus, or to a Jesus different from the biblical Jesus. Once again, missing faith and misapplied faith have the same disastrous result—spiritual death. If anyone ever tells you about any Jesus other than the one so clearly described in the Bible, know you are looking at a faith-wolf. Paul had this to say to the Corinthian Church:

2 Cor 11:2-4
I promised you to one husband, to Christ, so that I might present you as a pure virgin to him. 3 But I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4 For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough.

And to the Galatian Church he was compelled to say:

Gal 1:6-9
6 I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different gospel- 7 which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. 8 But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! 9 As we have already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let him be eternally condemned!

The conclusion to this discussion is this: To know the truth about Jesus, through Whom alone comes salvation, we must saturate ourselves in the Bible.

Legalism
Before we leave this subject I want to warn against a pitfall common to many who dedicate themselves to purity in doctrine. It is easy to fail to differentiate which doctrines are essential to salvation and become belligerent about fringe issues. Militant insistence on some trivial matter has turned many away from the church and ultimately Christ. Some of today’s molehills that are made into mountains are worship music, tongues, and buildings; there are many others as well. Paul had much to say in warning against fighting over disputable matters.

Rom 14:1-10
14:1 Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. 2 One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. 3 The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. 4 Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.

Paul then applies this theme to matters other than vegetables, and finally wraps up with:

Rom 14:22
So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God.

When you hear the Christian-ese term ‘legalistic,’ it refers to this practice of adding extra rules to grace. It is just as dangerous an extreme as false teaching on who Christ is. Both extremes rely on something other than Christ for salvation.

Beloved, beware of the wolves. Their only intent is to drag you into hell with them.

We will end with the prayer of Paul that we might truly know Jesus:

Phil 1:9-11
9 And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, 10 so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, 11 filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ-to the glory and praise of God.