Which Jesus Do You Follow? False Teaching -- Part 1

The Church of Jesus Christ stands or falls on the foundation of the apostles and the prophets with Christ Jesus Himself as the corner stone. What is this foundation? It is the teaching of the apostles and the prophets -- (truth) that forms this foundation of the church. God, Himself, revealed His mind to His children through the inspired (God-breathed)words found in Scripture. And all Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for teaching in righteousness,so that the man of God may be adequate for every good work. Truth is found in Scripture. 1 Timothy 3:15 says that the church is the pillar and support of the truth. In other words, the church is to "hold up" the truth to a dark and perverse world which is lost and condemned to hell without it. The Church is to be a visible testimony to the world around her by defending the truth, standing for the truth, defending the truth and proclaiming the truth. And that truth centers on Jesus Christ. If all Scripture is profitable for reproof and correction, what is to be reproved and corrected but lies and errors which are represented as truth?

What condemns a person to hell? It's not what a person does. It is unbelief. It's not believing or trusting that God is who He says He is as manifested in Jesus Christ of Scripture. It's not believing that Christ has done what Scripture says He has done. It's rejection of the truth as found in Scripture, specifically, rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

But someone says to you, "I'm a Christian, but I don't believe what you believe. (For example) I'm a Catholic. I don't believe you are to say bad things about other religions. I respect the beliefs of all people." That may sound really noble, but it is blasphemy against Christ who said that He is the way, the truth and the life -- that no one comes to the Father but by Him. If the Church is to defend the truth (as found in Jesus), then to say you are a Christian and believe this way is to call Christ of the Bible a liar. To believe that we are not to speak the truth about false religion and false teachers is to believe a lie instead of believing what Scripture explicitly says we are to do. We are always going to be faced with truth or error. There are only two options. Right or wrong. The problem is that today the world teaches that each man gets to decide what is right and what is wrong. That's relativism. But true Christians know and believe that truth is absolute.

So, which Jesus do you follow? Is it the Jesus of the Bible or another Jesus of your own making? Every word is inspired by God (literally God-breathed in the original Greek), so no one gets to choose what is the truth and what is not the truth in His Word because it is ALL TRUTH.

Why is it that people today will defend what they believe about anything -- ANYTHING -- more vehemently than the truth found in Scripture? I've listened to people squabble about ridiculous things more fiercely defending what they think is right than THE MOST important thing in life -- that which affects eternity. THAT is one thing we refuse to enter into a discussion about. It makes no sense.

But it's our calling from God, if we truly are Christians, to defend one way, one Gospel, one Savior, one Lord, etc. and to present that ONE to the world. Christianity is exclusive. There's no denying that. And I would never want to. I'm not ashamed of that one way to Christ because it's the mind of God to have provided one way. He could have said, "There's NO way!" And He would have been just in doing that. To not defend the truth as found in Scripture is sin. When you hear someone make a false statement about Christ or the truth found in His Word and say nothing, you are sinning. To not call someone to the truth when they are obviously confused and deceived is not loving. That, too, is sin.

To say that we should all unite around "Jesus" is an empty, meaningless statement unless what you say ABOUT Jesus and your understanding of Him is firmly rooted and anchored in the Scriptures. The Muslims believe in Jesus, but he's not the Jesus of the Bible. Jesus Christ is God in the flesh.

It's only by God's grace alone that I know what I believe today, and it's only by His grace that I am truly saved. And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I am saved and will spend eternity with my Lord and Savior. But at one time I was dead in my trespasses and sins unable to save myself. And, I was confused and had bought the lies of Satan.

I used to be Catholic. I wasn't raised Catholic but converted to Catholicism because I thought it would unite my family due to the fact that my husband was born and raised a staunch Catholic. His family is FULL of nuns, priests and monsignors, etc. on both sides! (I had foolishly agreed to raise my children as Catholics; and at the time, didn't see anything wrong with that, so it made sense that we would all be Catholic.) Looking back, I was a really good Catholic -- I followed all the rules and did all the things that made me look really religious to everyone around me. Whenever the doors of the church were open, I was there. And I was involved in everything, especially with the school that my children attended. In all actuality, I probably became a better Catholic than my husband.

What I didn't know is that the Jesus of my Bible was not the Jesus of the Catholic Church. Thinking I was a Christian at the time, it never occurred to me that to add Catholicism would be anything other than a good thing. I didn't know my Bible because I "got saved" in a Charismatic church that taught a lot of strange things that never really made sense to me. Because everything was interpreted so mystically, I never had any desire to read the Bible because I didn't understand any of it. (Had I known, that should have been a major red flag.) Consequently, I didn't really know what I believed and jumped into the Catholic pool with both feet. Not long after that I started listening to Christian radio and started having some disputes with the nuns at the school where my children were attending. My kids were confronting the teachers on the errors that they were being taught. I joined in (defending their defense of truth as found in Scripture). During that period of time, I seriously thought that I should stay and God would use me to change the Catholic church. Yeah right, right? I truly believed that God was telling me to stay, but there was a lot of mystical teaching left inside me that needed to be weeded out, and the way I thought God was speaking to me was one of them.

My oldest son was confronted at his 8th-grade confirmation by a nun who told him that he should start to behave better now that "he had received the Holy Spirit." When he looked at me and asked, "Mom, I thought you told me I received the Holy Spirit when I was saved," I instantly knew that we had to get out. And we did. There were some other silly things that happened involving coughing, eucharist and nuns and priests on their hands and knees, but I won't get into that. Talk about sad!

He may look the same, but the Catholic Jesus did not accomplish what my Jesus did on the cross. In fact, the Catholic Jesus is still on the cross, and He is sacrificed over and over and over again hundreds of thousands of times a day throughout the world. My Jesus said that His death was a once-for-all sacrifice for sin and that it was finished on the cross at Calvary. The curtain was torn in two from top to bottom so that I can now go boldly into the throneroom of grace. I no longer need to go through a priest or Mary to get to God. I go directly to God with Christ as my only Mediator. Mary is a saint like all believers and she, also, is no mediator between man and God. The Gospel my Jesus offers is not the gospel of the Catholic Church. Paul said that anyone who comes with another gospel is to be anathema (cursed and condemned). Incidentally, the Catholic Church teaches that anyone who does not believe her gospel is to be anathema. And she says it over and over again, and has for centuries. Nothing has changed since Vatican II like they would have us to believe. False religion is based on a foundation of lies. And when serious questions come up, more lies are contrived to cover up all the other lies. It's a tangled web of deceit.

A different gospel is false teaching. If God is true and cannot lie, Jesus is the Truth, and Satan has been a liar from the beginning, then all teaching that is not according to truth is false and is from Satan, the father of lies. To support the lies, heresies and errors and defend them is to support Satan and defend him. To say nothing is also to defend his lies. If someone speaks a lie believing it to be the truth, and I sit there and say nothing, their conclusion is this: "We must agree. I know she believes the Bible and says she is a Christian, therefore, I must be okay, too." How unloving it is to deceive someone in this way!

The work of Satan has always been to oppose God and to oppose the truth. Satan tries to undermine and corrupt the truth however he can do it. False teachers "say bad things about the truth" (by distorting it) all the time, but they do it by covering it in a layer of truth. They intentionally cover up their lies. It's like putting sugar over rat poison. What Christians are called to do is to expose error -- to separate the sugar from the rat poison so they can easily be identified and seen for what they truly are.

The work of the church, on the other hand, is to be a pillar and support of the truth. Anyone who says he or she follows Christ reads His Word in order to get to know Him and to know truth. Anyone who reads His Word knows that false teaching has been around since the beginning when Satan tried to confuse and twist God's truth to Eve. Anyone who reads His Word knows that the apostles constantly warned the early church about the dangers of false teachers and their heresies. They were already infiltrating the church at every turn.

It is the responsibility of pastors and elders to guard the flock, to be faithful to the Word of God, to see that the church has been equipped to be that pillar and support of the truth and to shine its light into this dark world. If you are not part of a church whose leadership is warning you of the false teaching out there which is rampant in our culture today and equipping you to expose it and fight against it, then you need to confront them in love about it. If they refuse to listen to the words of God in Scripture, then you need to find a church where you can be equipped to do what God has called you -- YOU -- to do.

We must realize that we can spot a false teacher not only by what they say, but more often by what they DON'T say. Many false teachers will not deny the truth, they just don't choose to preach about it. Any teacher who refuses to talk about sin, the wrath of God, judgment, a life of self-denial, etc. is a man-pleaser and needs to be confronted. You can't be a man-pleaser and a follower of Christ. To be so concerned about what others will think about you so that you compromise the truth is a form of idolatry. To not speak all the truth is just as bad as openly, blatantly speaking lies.

As much as it may shock some people, Scripture does not call Christians to get along with everyone. That's not our purpose or our calling. We're not to try and smoothe things over when there's a battle for the truth going on. We can never 'get along' at the sacrifice of truth. His truth!

The Church of Jesus Christ today needs to start standing up for the truth. Often the same Christians who won't stand for the truth are the ones who like to sit around and talk about how bad things are getting in the world. "Oh, did you hear about so and so? Yes, it's terrible, just awful. What an evil world we live in." If you are not doing anything about it by letting your light shine out in this dark world, then you are a hypocrite. 2 Timothy 3:13 says that it is going to get worse. "But evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived." If you are one of those who is sitting around thinking the world is going to get better, it's not. It's going to get a lot worse. Things are going to go from bad to worse, but the Church is to be anchored in the Word of God. We will stand firm and not be shaken when all hell breaks loose around us if we know the truth that sets us free.

We're to preach the Word in season and out of season -- when it's popular and when it's not popular. Why? Because there is a day coming (Paul says) when men will not endure sound doctrine (teaching), wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires. That day is upon us. Today we literally have "piled up" or "heaped up in piles" false teachers who love to tickle men's ears -- telling them what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear.

True believers all over the world are finding it harder and harder to find churches with leaders who are willing to stand steadfast and strong, contending for the truth once for all delivered to the saints. We need to let our leaders know that we won't tolerate weak-watered down gospel preaching. The true church is hungry for the truth, and the Good Shepherd will take care of His own, but the way He has established is by giving men to the church who would equip the body. Cry out for it with a loud voice! Don't go the way of the crowd and be swayed by lies.

So, I ask you today -- Are you going to go the way of the crowd or are you going to stand against error and stand for the real Christ as revealed to us in Scripture? It's not enough to use the excuse, "Well, I don't know enough yet." "Maybe I'll be able to stand strong when I know my Bible better." If you are truly saved, you know how you got saved. You know the Gospel. If you don't know what the Gospel is and are not able to tell someone how you got saved, maybe you need to examine yourself to make sure you are in the faith. Get to know the Word so that you not only feel it is your duty to defend Him but you are indignant when lies are being spoken about Him and about the truth and you are passionate and zealous to speak the truth in love BECAUSE you love Him and the children who belong to Him.