Tactics of False Teachers (Part B)

In the Bible, freedom does not mean doing your own thing or having your own way. Freedom means we are free to follow the Lord, to submit to Him, to pursue His view. The very essence of sin is going contrary to that. The freedom that Christ offers means enjoyment in salvation, in my future. Do any of you get depressed when you think about heaven? I don't.

I get charged, and that's the way it should be. This is Cross-Reference Radio with our pastor and teacher Rick Gaston. Rick is the pastor of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville. Pastor Rick is currently teaching through the book of 2 Peter.

Please stay with us after today's message to hear more information about Cross-Reference Radio, specifically how you can get a free copy of this teaching. But for now, let's join Pastor Rick in the book of 2 Peter chapter 2 as he continues his message, Tactics of False Teachers. You come to church to break free from lawlessness, not to have it promoted. They'll lure through the flesh of the lust of the flesh. That means they are appealing to the sinful nature of their victims.

Their victims are helping. Yeah, I kind of like that. You mean I don't have to? You mean I can?

Okay, sign me up. That's seduction. 1 Thessalonians 3, For this reason when I could no longer endure it, I sent to know your faith, lest by some means the tempter had tempted you, and our labor might be in vain. Paul wrote to the church at Thessalonica that he and Silas showed up to, again still wounded from the beat down they took in Philippi. They get there. They make converts nonetheless. They establish a church.

They get chased out of Thessalonica. Paul says, man, what is happening to them? Have they gone backwards into paganism?

Has someone creeped into their lives and taken them out of the faith? He was worried that he and Silas preached to them, saved their souls, and then they renounced the faith. So he writes the two letters. Well, the first one, 1 Thessalonians, to address that.

He writes the second one to deal with other questions. So where I'm going with that, if there was such a thing as one saved always saved, then why would the apostle be concerned? This is a popular man-made teaching, and it has just taken over Christianity, so much so if you say anything against the people who are insulted. I've been hitting it since we've been in this section of Peter because he hits it. Not a pet doctrine or anti-doctrine of mine. I like all of the word.

I'd like any section that I happen to be in, except the ones that hurt my feelings. It starts in Genesis and ends in Revelation. Through lewdness. Now we'll come back to that once saved always saved teaching because I believe in the abiding security of the believer. You abide with Christ and nothing can touch your soul. There is therefore now no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus.

We have an advocate with the Father. His name is Jesus Christ. He loves me.

He loves you. And as long as I want him to be my Lord, he will be my Lord. I do not believe when you come to Christianity that he strips you of your free will.

That would reduce us to being robots. And what love exists without free will? You better love me. You put it like that, I won't love you. Well, I mean, you know, I hope you know. Anyway, not talking about me, let's talk about you.

What do you think wonderfully about me? Through lewdness. Yeah, that's a time release. False Christianity ignores sin or excuses it or condones it or looks the other way when it sees it. That's false Christianity. Forgiving sin of those who hate their sin, that's Christianity. Christ will certainly be there for the sinner that repents. But the sinner that could care less about repentance, well, you know, I've confessed Christ, it's just got to be forgiven. I'm owed this. I'm entitled to this.

We have a serious breakdown there. Ignoring sin is for those who trample the blood of Christ, not love the Lord Jesus Christ. And we all know this. He died a violent death because of sin, my sin.

I have no right to dismiss it as something as being trivial. Now, you can't overdo it because then we'll be so beaten by guilt that we won't be able to function. So we strike that balance which grace is. And we understand there are things about me that I struggle with, but I do struggle in Christ.

And He is quick to forgive and to restore and to move forward. But if I just dismiss sin in my life or anybody else's life or condone it, then I am disrespecting the Lord Jesus Christ and the New Testament is all over this. And so what He says here is that they deceive people through lewdness.

Those both, the false teachers are lewd and so are those who are attracted to them. The ones He says here, the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in error. Unfortunately, some of your Bibles may, I use, I prefer the New King James, especially for the New Testament. Most of the other translations are academically pushed forward, but in the New Testament, their source material is wrong. The Alexandrian text, the Vaticanus text, they are flawed, I should say, and not wrong, but they are flawed and therefore susceptible to all sorts of changes, interpolations are put upon them.

So, for example, when you come to Mark's Gospel chapter 16, it ends this way in those source materials and the apostles or the followers of Christ were all afraid and that's how it ends. And then they tell you, well, we're older manuscripts so we're right and the newer manuscripts are wrong, but that's not the case at all. The newer, the source material for the NIV, the NASB, and almost every other translation, they use the older manuscripts that are in the minority as far as how many fragments and whole books exist. Whereas the King James version, for example, goes with the Syrian text, which has over 24,000 whole scriptures, New Testament we're talking about, and fragments. And they're younger because they were kept in circulation.

That's why they're younger. That's why there are so many of them. Whereas the other texts, they fell out of use and that's why there's only about a hundred of them. And so those documents will take a verse like this and make it say what it does not mean. Also, there was a heavy Gnostic influence in Egypt with those corrupted verses or fragments and documents come from.

So anyway, I'm trying to condense into just a few minutes. I just mean to go down this rabbit trail, condense into a few minutes that there's a way to determine what is trustworthy and what is not. And actually, even with their own materials, if you continue to read what is being said, you find it as self-correcting as we're going to come to in a moment. So when he says that the ones who have actually escaped from those who live in terror, that's exactly what it means. Not those who were escaping, who weren't quite saved yet. He is talking about people who have come out of the world, have confessed Christ, born again, and then follow the false teachers. I named a string of them last session.

I'm not going to do it again this session. And so these false teachers go after believers. They hunt believers. That makes perfect sense from hell's standpoint. Hell wants to take believers back. Satan believes that you don't belong to God, you belong to Him.

It's part of his derangement. And so those, again, who believe the one saved always saved have yet another verse to tell us it doesn't mean what it clearly says. As I read from Thessalonians chapter 3 verse 5 above.

So verse 19, we'll develop this a little bit more. And I have to pause here. I have never felt fear of losing my salvation since I've been a Christian. Not once. Not once.

Oh, I wonder if I messed it up. I heard the voice of Jesus Christ when I was born again. I knew He said He loved me and He saved me. I happen to believe that. Yes, there are many areas I fall short in.

Well, there's one. But I know my salvation is not a fragile thing. Hell cannot overthrow it. As long as I want Him to be my Lord, He will be my Lord and hell can do nothing about it and neither can anybody else. I don't need to cook up doctrines to make me feel safer.

It's good the way it is. So verse 19, while they promised them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption. For by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. Why would they promise them liberty when Christ has done a better job?

You see how it works? The ones that they're promising aren't satisfied with the liberty Christ has already given them. They want more. You don't need more.

How much can you carry? Some fail to realize that freedom and recklessness are not the same thing. The prodigal son, Samson, Saul, King Saul, Solomon, all these made the mistake of thinking that freedom and recklessness went together. In the Bible, freedom does not mean doing your own thing or having your own way. Freedom means we are free to follow the Lord, to submit to Him, to pursue His view.

The very essence of sin is going contrary to that. The freedom that Christ offers means enjoyment, in salvation, in my future. Do any of you get depressed when you think about heaven?

I don't. I get charged and that's the way it should be because that's where our Savior is, the one who loves us and the Father loves us just as much. The Holy Spirit loves us just as much. When we enter into heaven, we will be very welcomed. Even the weakest Christian will be very welcomed into heaven. God doesn't offer a reluctant salvation. Well, okay.

He never does that because He is love. See, once we grab hold of this, we get stronger. We don't get weaker. We don't need, you know, a stroller to, you know, you sit the little baby in a chair and they kind of move around, a little pacifier in their mouth like a little flying saucer or something.

We don't need that. Christ wants us up and moving in the strength of understanding the faith we have and that's why He's taken so much time to not only author the Scripture but preserve it. Do you have any idea how much of an accomplishment it is to preserve the Word of God as we have it? So these false freedoms are based upon lies and half-truths which are lies because they have no fear of the wrath of God because they're no longer believers.

These false teachers really don't believe it. And when it collapses, it will be big enough to kill anybody caught underneath it and that would be a judgment day. They themselves, Peter says, are slaves of corruption. You've got to serve somebody as the song goes. It might be the devil or it might be the Lord but you've got to serve somebody.

And throughout that song, he lists all sorts of scenarios. You can call me Bobby. You can call me Billy.

You can call me anything. You've got to serve somebody. You're not getting away from this. I don't care what kind of name games you play, you're not getting away. You've got to serve somebody.

It's going to be Satan or it's going to be the Lord. So, accepting this, where he says they themselves are slaves of corruption as opposed to slaves of Jesus Christ. They have enslaved themselves because their appetite wants and the only way they're going to get what they want is to corrupt because being honest and straight, how many people out there lie and cheat and steal so they can get what they want? And we, of course, are not at all encouraged to do this.

Many an addicted person will lie and say that they're free, that they're really not in bondage but they are. Apostates reject the biblical, the Bible's authority. They reject the Holy Spirit. So, no matter how clever or convincing their conclusions are, they're wrong. And again, I think many Christians don't really understand that.

It's fundamental. If you have rejected the lordship of Christ, if you have rejected his word, what wisdom do you have? What is left? The prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, they had to go through this very thing with their people. The people rejected the prophecies, the scriptures and the prophets scratched their head and said, what are you left with? Jeremiah said, my people love to have it so.

What is wrong with them? He continues, he says, for by whom a person is overcome, by him also he is brought into bondage. That word for overcome is overcome, vanquished, conquered. In the Greek, it means to be vanquished and that's what he is talking. If you follow false believers, you will be defeated in your faith.

He's not talking about a recipe for strawberry shortcake. He's talking about salvation. These false teachers are hypocritical predators. They are opportunistic, they are spiritually deadly and you shouldn't get tired of hearing it either.

You should, it's not, oh, I can't, okay, I got it, I got it. No, it's like that's right, hammer this in because the Holy Spirit does so. As I mentioned, we have eight successive chapters from 1st, from 2nd Peter chapter 1 through 1st John chapter 5 that is dealing with these false people. They're highly skilled at identifying their targets and then manipulating them. They win the trust of their victims and then they feed on them like a tick.

They gorge and after they've gotten what they want, they fall off. Their lies appeal to the ignorant, biblically ignorant. You can be scholastically or academically intelligent but if you are biblically ignorant, they're looking for you. You are a delicacy in Satan's mouth. Can't wait to find you because you don't have the shield of faith that is built off the word of God off of truth.

If you have a shield of trust built off of lies, it's not faith, it's trust in lies. So you go to a church and you there expect to hear the good news about salvation that man is a sinner and God is a savior but you don't get that. You may get parts of it but you get other stuff that defeat the very principles and truths of our word. And so you say, it sounds good.

Yeah? Well run it through the scripture. Filter it through God's word.

Tell me if it still sounds good. Now, I know you all have relatives, not all of you but some of you have relatives that are caught up in various heresies, false teachings. What do you do about that? There's a couple of things you could do. You study to show yourself approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of God and you wait. That's what you do.

And in that wait time, because you wait for the Lord to open the door or not, the Lord's prerogative is to open or close the door and you pray and you never stop praying. This is how we do business and hell hates it and is determined to get you to not believe what I just said, to study the word of God, to be submitted to the Holy Spirit of God and to pray. And this is something that is not, you know, we settle for. We don't settle for this.

This is what we do. This is what upsets hell. This is what gets souls into heaven otherwise God never would have made these things so clear. How do you read in your scripture in your New Testament that they couldn't find Jesus in the morning because he had gotten away from everybody and he was praying for hours? When you read that, you tell me, do you forget that? Does that not stand out to you? And you say, I want some of that.

I don't have what it takes to do all of that, but I want some of that. God teaches and preaches to us in so many ways through his scripture. It's an inexhaustible word. A man can preach from the same verse over and over again and say different things if the Spirit should so fill him. Well anyway, these converts are picked off because the Bible is just too much work to learn for themselves. They are not very familiar with all of the scripture. They just want the parts that tell them Jesus loves them and he's going to forgive us.

The doomed leading the doomed. Matthew's gospel chapter 3, John the Baptist preaching. John says, his winnowing fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire. Who is ready to stand up and look John the Baptist in the eye and say liar!

I'm not. Those words are true and they're current. His winnowing fan, he's going to separate the wheat, the grain, the edible part from the husk, the chaff. And he's going to put them in piles and there will be a judgment.

God's not playing around. And you know you say well this just scares me. It should scare you a little bit. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

Get your concordance, go through the book of Proverbs and just look up the fear of the Lord and see how many things we are told that are to our benefit concerning fearing our God. We're not terrorized by him. Unless we can be. Walk that back a little bit.

We don't live that way. We walk with Jesus as the apostles walked with Jesus. They didn't walk, oh don't get too close, oh don't let them look your way. They were not panic stricken walking with Christ. Peter was quick to say what do you mean asking us who touched you?

Look at the crowds. He was honest. Of course Christ had gone far deeper than what Peter understood.

Jesus said power went out from me. Somebody was more than curious about me. Somebody was serious about me. And I felt that touch.

And he still does it that way. Christ makes the distinction between the curious and the serious. And it because you're serious now doesn't mean you'll be serious later, but you should be. I think most are. I don't think there is a large number of apostates relative to the amount of people who come to Christ and never look back at the world. I think there are far more people who get saved and enter into heaven than those who confess Christ as Lord and Savior and then at some point become apostates.

I think that number is relatively small, but it is still big enough to be serious enough to not overlook. I am not going to tell somebody don't worry you confess Christ you can go worship Buddha you'll be alright. That would be a lie from hell. So we move to verse 20 now.

Now after all of this we're going to have a nice day. Verse 20. For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

I love just reading that. They are again entangled in them and overcome. The latter end is worse for them than the beginning. You see it self correcting if you say well I don't think I think that verse it meant that they are in the process of escaping when they get well this verse doesn't word it that way at all.

It comes right out and say says right out that they got out of the world they escaped it and then they are reentangled in that life that did not recognize Jesus Christ as Lord. Because something is popular doesn't mean anything to me at all. I don't care how popular a teaching is or something is in Christianity I don't care who says it. If I think it disagrees with the Bible I'm not going with that team and I would want the same from everybody else.

I would well I mean you couldn't get there with me because I'm always right. I know I say that a lot because it's so absurd it is so ridiculous that a human being of any type would think that they were flawless or beyond mistake or sinless in this life. And so I like to think it's the funniest thing to be so proud to be humble.

Things like that to me just excite me and I overdo it I know but that's your fault for coming. So you just spin it around make the other guy guilty and everybody has a nice day. Well what we've come to in verse 20 is abiding in Christ. That makes the entire question of can I lose my salvation? Once they've always it makes an entire thing non-issue.

I have to repeat that. Abiding in Christ makes the entire issue of once saved always saved a non-issue. Because I'm abiding in Christ of course I'm saved. What part of eternal security do you not understand that you get when you abide with Christ? Coming to Christ does not mean again that he strips us of free will. You want to up and go you know he's not going to uh-uh no you are my prisoner it's not that not God and that not love. Instead instead of stripping us of free will he gives us the Holy Spirit.

He gives it to he puts them in our hearts. Says now if you want to override that that's your choice. I highly recommend you don't. That's all we have time for on today's edition of Cross Reference Radio. You've been listening to Pastor Rick Gaston of Calvary Chapel Mechanicsville in Virginia as he teaches through the book of 2nd Peter. If you'd like to listen to more messages from this series or if you'd like more information about this program please visit our website crossreferenceradio.com. We also encourage you to subscribe to our podcast so you'll never have to miss a program. Just search for Cross Reference Radio in iTunes, Google Play Music or your favorite podcast app. What a great way to keep God's Word with you wherever you go. We hope you'll tune in again next time as Pastor Rick continues studying through the scriptures right here on Cross Reference Radio.