“They have butter in their mouths, but swords in their hearts.”
–Samuel Otes (commenting on the corrupt teachers in Jude)
Dear church family,
For the next few weeks, we will be in the book of Jude. Please read and reread the book, meditate on it, and the sermons will be more meaningful for the work you have done beforehand. Last Sunday, we looked at five opening truths concerning false teachers:
- False teachers infiltrate the church secretly.
- False teachers, however, are known by God and have been marked out for condemnation.
- False teachers are ungodly people.
- False teachers pervert the grace of God into sensuality.
- False teachers deny the Lord Jesus Christ, our Master.
In addition to my introductory points which are drawn primarily from Jude, I want to add, over the course of the next three or four devotionals, some points made by Rhyne R. Putman, from his book, When Doctrine Divides the People of God. Putman notes:
The New Testament Epistles offer several characteristics of false teachers and those susceptible to their teachings:
1. False teaching preys on the spiritually immature.
Paul repeatedly expresses concern for the minds of believers who may be “led astray” by belief in a different Jesus, a different spirit, and a different gospel (2 Cor. 11:3–4; cf. Gal. 1:6–7). Elsewhere, he asserts that believers will have true “unity of the faith” only when they will “no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:13–14).
2. False teaching can be the product of distorted interpretations of Scripture by those not firmly established in the truth.
Some pervert the meaning of Scriptures that are “hard to understand,” doing so “to their own destruction” (2 Pet. 3:16). The emphasis made here is not on a particular method of interpretation or the difficulty of the texts themselves but on the type of people who distort the Scriptures—“ignorant and unstable” people.
The common theme in these passages is the necessity of all believers to press on to maturity through a growing knowledge of the Scriptures. Let’s do that together! Come to Sunday School as we begin to examine Jude then and don’t forget the time change this Sunday.
Love in Christ,
Pastor Dale
