Prophets ain t prophets

Transcription

1 Prophets ain t prophets Safe with the Lord Morning Worship, Lord s Day 4 th October 2008, 9.30am Rev D. Rudi Schwartz 1 Bible Readings New Testament: 2Peter 2:1, Old Testament: Jeremiah 23:16 22 Hymns/Songs Main Points 1. Approach: Hail to the Lord s anointed 2. Forgiveness of sins: My hope is in the Lord 3. Thanksgiving: Join all the glorious names 4. Response: A mighty fortress is our God 1. Introduction 2. Biblical teaching 3. False teachers and teachings a. Secretly b. Greedy for position and recognition c. Exploiters 4. Destruction 5. Conclusion Prayer of Confession of sin Our Heavenly Father, We witnessed the greatness of your provision in the form of rain: the fields are green and lush; the crops have the promise of fulfilment and the flowers of the field sing out the glory of their Maker. Once again the creeks hold water, farm dams are filled up and ducks and other water birds are coming back. We even saw the odd swallow returning after the winter. Father, how soon can your grace turn things around for those whom You love. We thank You, Father, for hearing our prayers. We look forward to the completion of your grace in this season. But as it was with old Israel in the times of the Judges, we as a nation might soon forget how good and great You are. Out of your grace we might soon once again slide back in glorifying 1 Feel free to copy, quote or duplicate this document.

2 Prophets ain t prophets 2 ourselves. We might not even remember how we asked for You to send down the rain, until we once again face the devastation of another drought. So, Lord, we pray that somehow, through the Gospel preaching regarding the salvation in Jesus Christ, people will be drawn to You in faith to worship You in Christ as Lord and Saviour. Father, we come to You with our prayer of confession of sins. There are the personal sins everyone here today will have to confess before You. Give grace, Father, that we will be honest: help us therefore to turn away from what is wrong. Help us to have strength to overcome the sins we might foster in the secret corners of our lives. We cannot have victory over sins as long as we feed them with wilful and explicit desires. Father, help us to win this battle over these things. Help us to look up to You, to understand that we have not come to know the Lord Jesus Christ as One who would tolerate anything else but supreme and sacrificial love and commitment. Forgive us for cultivating private and secret sins; help us to abhor these things, and daily find triumph in the Name of Him who overcame the evil on the cross and the open grave. We confess our sins as a church. As a body of the Lord Jesus Christ we more often than not do not display brotherly love, care and encouragement of one another. Our thinking can be worldly and our care for one another can be superficial and bound to the temporal things. We know that You want us to serve one another with what we have, but we have to confess that we very rarely care for one another in spiritual things. Give us to openness to talk to one another about our relationship with You; help us to pray for one another s spiritual advancement; help us to work together as a team with one goal which is to glorify our Master and seek the furtherance of his Kingdom. Forgive us Lord, when our world is not bigger than the needs of our congregation. Help us to take note of the need around us, and then, Lord, give us the will to do something about it. Help us to have wide horizons in our prayer, courage in our faith, practical application for our obedience, and help us Lord, to like William Carey expect great things from God, attempt great things for God. Save us from selfish ambition, self centred objectives, and self serving programs. Help us, Lord, and give us an understanding of the Kingdom of God, and the sin slaved world around us, so that we will be awakened out of our spiritual sleep to be on duty of our Lord with a soldier s mindset to be available while on duty, even if it means that we need to step out of our comfort zone. Help us to test our faith, put is to practice, be experienced in the things of the Lord, and be spiritually fit for the Kingdom. We pray these things in the Name of our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ. Amen. 1. Introduction Fellow disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, There is a man in India who claims that when the astronauts put their foot on the moon, the Lord Jesus Christ came into him and he became Christ. He advised his disciples that he is Christ and in him alone is safety. On hearing this, many people from Germany, Europe and the USA arrived over here and they are staying with him in huts somewhere at the tip of India in Tinnevelly District. Some of them have brought in thousands of dollars and gave it all to him.

3 Prophets ain t prophets 3 Some false prophets come in the cloak of very respectful media personalities. They don t love in primitive huts on a mountain. They are indeed much more overt, having the mass media to their disposal and they lean on age old stupidity of the New Age Movement. Helen Schucman authored a book A Course in Miracles. She claims to have channelled messages from a New Age Jesus who would show us how to thrive in difficult times. Interestingly the last two years of her life were characterized by deep and chronic depression. The threevolume work contains gems of wisdom such as this: God himself is incomplete without me. God is simply a nonphysical love force that is neither vengeful, judgmental, nor punishing only loving and forgiving. Sin is the grand illusion. We are to make this claim for ourselves: I am the light of the world. The name Jesus is the name of one who was a man but saw the face of Christ in all his brothers and remembered God. You are one with God. Again, how simple is salvation? It is merely a statement of your true humanity. My salvation comes from me. If we take it that this Second Letter of Peter is indeed the following the first, we understand that Peter were encouraging new believers in Christ who did not necessarily had any Jewish background. They were new to the faith and were exposed to extraordinary persecution because of their faith in Christ Jesus. Not only was this hardship they were exposed to something that came from without the church community, but it was something which came from within. There were some of their own number who became false teachers. They introduced a mixture of what was then known as the Gnostic philosophy with all its branches. This then, it what our chapter is talking about. It has a lesson of our day. The average Christian can easily fall for anything as long as it is sugar coated with a Bible text. There is hardly real Biblical discernment these days. We need to be wide awake, not only because of what we hear in Churches today, but also because of what comes to us in the mass media. Most of these things in most cases don t look like it is harmful, but in the end it serves to take us along on a road which leads to destruction. 2. Biblical teaching The end of chapter 1 of 2Peter helps us to measure all teachings by. Peter makes it clear to the people to whom he writes that they understand where he got the truth from. He states in verse 16: For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty. (2 Peter 1:16) The teaching of the apostles, the teaching of the Bible, is the teaching of God. It is inspired by the Holy Spirit and therefore to is true. The original writers of the Bible were eyewitnesses of the ministry of Jesus Christ. More so in the case of Peter. He and James and John were with the Lord Jesus Christ the day on the mountain when he was transfigured. We read about this in Matthew 17. Of this most extraordinary event Peter now writes:

4 Prophets ain t prophets 4 For when He received honor and glory from God the Father, such an utterance as this was made to Him by the Majestic Glory, This is My beloved Son with whom I am well pleased and we ourselves heard this utterance made from heaven when we were with Him on the holy mountain. (2 Peter 1:17 18) All other teachers, who do not hold to the teachings of the Lord and the teachings of the Scriptures, or those who distort these teachings, are false teachers. This Word of God is like a light shining in a dark place, and we need to pay attention to it. Why? He states the reason in the next verse: But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. (2 Peter 1:20 21) About this Word and its necessity Peter writes: Therefore, I will always be ready to remind you of these things, even though you already know them, and have been established in the truth which is present with you. I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder, (2 Peter 1:12 13) Let s sum it up. Biblical teaching is: divinely ordained and handed down by God to people he called for the purpose it is Spirit breathed and therefore the truth concerning God and his will for our lives we need to be constantly reminded of the message of the Bible because it will sustain us till the day of the return of Christ 3. False teachers and teachings False teachers have been there all the time, and will be there till the return of Christ. In most cases these false teachers are, as 2Pet 2:1 puts it, among the people. It was like this from the earliest days. Heresy is something the church of the Lord Jesus Christ will always have to contend with. At no stage in the history of the church, even the future of the church, will we not have false teachers. As a matter of fact, these false teachers might proliferate the closer we are to the return of Christ. We read about the cry in Jeremiah today: Thus says the Lord of hosts, Do not listen to the words of the prophets who are prophesying to you. They are leading you into futility; they speak a vision of their own imagination, not from the mouth of the Lord. They keep saying to those who despise Me, The Lord has said, You will have peace ; and as for everyone who walks in the stubbornness of his own heart, they say Calamity will not come upon you. (Jeremiah 23:16 17) How can one tell them for who they are? It is not easy, but let s look at a few things: a. Secretly They come in like wolves in sheep s clothing and introduce very unobtrusively new but destructive teachings. It seems as if what they teach flows from what is already known so that the average churchgoer would think it is just the natural next step. It happened in the times when Peter wrote his letter that some Gnostics most probably took the teachings of the Gospel about being saved by grace, and not being under the Law to the extreme to argue that as a result Christians are free to do as they wish. This

5 Prophets ain t prophets 5 ultimately led to destructive morals and open anarchy. Peter most probably refers to this in verse 10: and especially those who indulge the flesh in its corrupt desires and despise authority. (2 Peter 2:10) In this sense then, they denied the sovereign Lord who bought the church by his own blood to be his bride (verse 1). The sad truth is that many follow them and bring Christ and his Church in disrepute. b. Greedy for position and recognition There are those who will do whatever it costs to get to the top of the leadership. They will tell lies, make up their own Gospel and exploit people for the sake of being the head honcho of the show. Church history, past and contemporary, is littered with people like this. They form their own church, break away from the rest, usually making themselves out to be the real church, while the church they left are made out to be the false church. They are accountable to no other body except themselves. People are attracted to these people who step out in faith and many will tell you the heart breaking stories of selling their houses, giving away large sums of money to these preachers, only to find out that these self righteous leaders will not stand any opposition: they are the leader with wisdom and revelation, and who are you to dare stand up against them! Can I give you a word of warning: never run after a preacher who has no accountability other than himself. There are just too many souls wrecked by independent preachers who do not have to give account to any other as far as his teaching is concerned, or as far as financial matters is concerned. An uncle of mine, who was trapped into this thing, once said: If you want to get rich quickly, just start your own church! Are you unhappy with the spiritual nourishment of your church? Go to those to whom your minister is accountable. Are you unhappy about the way your tithes and offerings are used? Follow it up with those who are accountable if not on a local level, then on a higher level. To belong to an independent church is dangerous! Listen to verse 15: forsaking the right way, they have gone astray, having followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness; (2 Peter 2:15) An elderly lady rang me once. She suffered from a dreadful disease which caused her much pain. I had been to her and we had prayed about it more than once. But when this new evangelist came to town with his big tent, she decided that she might ask him to pray for her. So she gave him a ring and, right there on the spot, he prayed for her over the phone, almost over the lines of phone laid hands on her and assured her that the Lord healed her. She did not feel better and this is then where she rang me also with another matter: she has received a bill from the preacher for the services rendered! Many others found themselves in similar situations. They lost loved ones and searched for consolation about the state of the loved one; or they suffered from a heavy laden conscience because of sins they committed. They took refuge in a church leader, only to be told that a certain some of money will bring peace to the soul of the deceased or the peace of their own minds in terms of their sins. Over ages big cathedrals have been built

6 Prophets ain t prophets 6 with these moneys, and many, many souls are still in bondage of sin and guilt. The result: the Name of Christ and his church is brought in disrepute. c. Exploiters Many more can be said, but let us just point out this one aspect: In the days of the early church Holy Communion were usually followed by what was known as the love feasts. At occasions like these everyone would bring something for those who were in need. They would eat together and then hand out what was given for the destitute. Some of these greedy, exploiting church leaders would then abuse the gifts, either by taking it for themselves, or by promising to give it to the needy, do as they wish for people they personally favoured. And it might then be that the poor widow who they visit with these gifted goods is seduced by the so called good man of God. Verse 14: having eyes full of adultery that never cease from sin, enticing unstable souls, having a heart trained in greed, (2 Peter 2:14) And this happens in our day too. 4. Destruction These people will give account one day. They will stand before God. And we can only think about the Flood in the days of Noah and Sodom and Gomorrah and how God dealt with the ungodly to understand why Peter called the church to be aware of the danger of false teachers. My dear brothers and sisters, keep close to the Word of God. This is your only weapon against false teachers and false teachings. Even if you know it, read it, study it and defend it. Use it as your armour to withstand the onslaught of the devil and be more than a conquerer. Amen