The Urgency of Rejecting False Teachers #2

If you have the Bible and if you have Christ, the Bible says that you have everything pertaining to life and godliness. You don't need another book of Revelation.

You don't need a bunch of traditions. You don't need another teacher supposedly giving you present-day verbal revelations from God. If you ever had a knock on your door and opened it to find two so-called missionaries with a message that there's more than one revelation of Jesus Christ, you'll have seen what Don is going to speak about today on The Truth Pulpit. And this is The Truth Pulpit with Don Green, founding pastor of Truth Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio. I'm Bill Wright and we're continuing a series titled To Follow or To Flee with part two of a message called The Urgency of Rejecting False Teachers. And Don, you don't have to go too far to find false prophets, do you?

Well, I'm certainly like everyone else. False teachers come to my door talking about Joseph Smith or the Watchtower Society or perhaps something else. False prophets can be found asking for money on television, and then sometimes they wear clerical robes while they are denying the words of God. If you get weary of it all, as I do sometimes, take heart. God's Word is a light to your path. You can know the truth through careful attention to Scripture. God knows and protects those who honor His Word.

I trust that you'll be someone just like that. Well, friend, turn now to the book of 2 John as we join Don Green, continuing to teach God's people God's Word from The Truth Pulpit. Why is it so urgent to reject those men and women who would undermine the doctrine of the Incarnation?

I want to give you three specific things. First of all, they destroy redemption. When a false teacher comes and denies the Incarnation, says that Jesus is not fully equal with God, but that He was a created being, He was the first of God's creatures, they've destroyed revelation. Secondly, it's not just that they destroy our revelation, they also destroy our mediation. If Jesus Christ is not truly God and man, we have no mediator with God at all. So these false teachers destroy redemption by destroying our revelation, they destroy our mediation.

Thirdly, they destroy our illustration. They destroy our illustration that we have in Christ. Because if Jesus is not truly a man, we don't have an example to follow at all. As members of the human race, we don't have a perfect example to follow. Peter said that Christ left us an example to follow, 1 Peter 2.21. Christ left us an example to follow. Well, we can follow His example because we are like human flesh with Him, except for the sin, but Christ gave us a human example for us to follow, and the Bible points us to His example repeatedly. And so if you deny that Christ has come in flesh, that God has come in flesh, you destroy all those aspects of true Christianity.

We haven't seen God. We don't have a mediator who can bring us to God. We don't have a perfect example that we can follow as we seek to live the Christian life. They destroyed our redemption with their false teaching about Christ. Destroyed it, that is, in the sense that if you believed it and embraced their false teaching, it would destroy salvation for you.

You can't believe that and be saved. 1 John 1.5 says that God is light. The gospel is light. It's the light of salvation to men. What false teachers do when they corrupt the nature of Christ is they come and they turn out the light, and they leave us in darkness.

They turn out the light and leave us with nowhere to turn. And that's why John is so animated. That's why we must reject false teachers and reject them clearly and forcefully because there's so much at stake. You see, it's not about us personally rejecting them. It's about us as faithful stewards of the gospel, protecting the gospel, protecting those who would come under the sound of false teaching by clearly setting forth what the issues are, by clearly rejecting that kind of false teaching, by clearly condemning it, we are not being unloving, we are being protectors of the truth. We are being faithful of the stewardship that God has given to us. And so, when Christians don't act in that capacity, they give false teachers room to destroy redemption. Now secondly, John gives us something, another reason why we must reject false teachers, the rejecting nature of truth and love. It's not just that they destroy our redemption, but B, they diminish your reward. They diminish your reward.

They have the potential to diminish your eternal reward based on how you respond to them. Look at verse 8 where John says, "'Watch yourselves that you do not lose what we have accomplished, but that you may receive a full reward.'" Watch yourselves. The verb tense calls for ongoing action. It's a call to action.

It's a call to ongoing diligence. It's a call to being a watchful guard over the truth that's been entrusted to us. And John is telling this woman to be careful so that your own eternal reward will not be diminished, get this, that your own eternal reward will not be diminished because you have participated in the evil works of these deceivers.

It says, be careful here. There's a whole lot at stake for you. Your eternal reward is at stake as you interact with these men, and if you aid and abet them, you're aiding and abetting those who undermine the gospel. And of course your reward would be diminished at the judgment seat of Christ at that point. The Bible teaches us in 2 Corinthians 5 and Romans 14 and other places that believers will face a judgment from Christ in which He will reward us for our service to Him. And one of the benchmarks of the nature of our reward will be our faithfulness to Him.

Faithful in a cup of water even will not lose its reward. What John is saying here is that indiscriminate involvement with false teachers is so seriously viewed by God that it will diminish our eternal reward if we are not on guard against it. This is a matter of high consequence. This is a matter of eternal consequence that he's dealing with here. Now let's flesh out, well, what would that look like?

What would that look like today? Well, let me just suggest one example to you. You've probably heard people say these kinds of things. I've heard it over the years multiple times. People will become a Christian in a false church environment, in a liberal church or something, and they'll say, I'm going to stay in this church so that I can influence them for the gospel.

I'll stay here and I'll work in this environment so that I can be a light to them. Well, that's wrong. That is not what the Bible pattern is at all. You cannot spread the gospel in a false system. When the authority in the church and the authority and the leadership of the church is teaching damning lies and they affirm that and they reject the gospel, you cannot be under that kind of spiritual authority and still be faithful to Christ. The response to that, if you want to minister the gospel to them, is to get out of it so that by your life you testify to the falsity of it and then you speak into it from outside rather than trying to speak to it from inside the system.

Watch yourselves so that you may receive a full reward. John warns us about being involved by participating in the works of false teachers. Look down at verse 11, we'll come to this again in a minute, but I want you to see this in this context.

In verses 10 and 11, he says, If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house, do not give him a greeting, for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deed. You have to extract yourself from the false system and you have to love Christ above all else. You have to love Christ more than father and mother and even more than spouse in order to be faithful.

You know, I realize that these issues of mixed marriages and you get saved and in the middle of your marriage, I realize those raise all kinds of difficult issues that require a lot of wisdom and tact in order to be able to deal with them faithfully, but you just have to see the primary call of God that you cannot stay in a false system of religion and be faithful to Christ. You can't give a loyalty to a human relationship that allows you to participate in the evil works of false teachers. The consequences of the gospel are pretty stark, aren't they? It's pretty sobering to consider these things, but John says when you participate in their work, participating in their evil deeds and there will be eternal consequences, not heaven and hell kinds of consequences, but a loss of reward and indiscriminate involvement with false teachers can diminish your eternal reward. Be careful, John says, watch out. Be diligently guarding yourself from this so that you would receive your full reward. And what I want you to see is that when John talks that way, the Apostle John talks that way, when the Bible talks that way, it is the most loving thing that the Scripture could tell you. To not warn somebody about this is to be indifferent to the extent of their eternal reward. Where is love in that? If you know this, if the Bible says this and you know it and you don't warn people about it, how is that loving? How can you turn a blind eye to that? You can't. You can't. You see, truth determines the boundaries of love.

And when you truly love someone, you're truly concerned about their eternal destiny, their eternal reward, that they would receive the fullness of blessing that God has for them. You speak on these things. You warn them.

You caution them. That's what John says here. Watch yourselves. When he started talking this way, he didn't suddenly stop being the apostle of love. He didn't suddenly stop being concerned about love, which had dominated his opening sentences. He didn't suddenly stop being concerned about grace, mercy, and peace. No, all of those factors are motivating the godly man when he warns people against involvement with false teachers.

It's a whole different view of love than the false sentimentality that marks so much of professing evangelical Christianity today, isn't it? So why must we reject false teachers? Why is it so urgent to reject them? They destroy redemption by destroying our revelation, mediation, and illustration. They diminish our eternal reward. Thirdly, they disfigure Christian maturity. They disfigure Christian maturity. So we reject them. We avoid them because they destroy redemption. They diminish our reward and they disfigure Christian maturity. Look at verse 9 here. John says, "'Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God.

The one who abides in the teaching, he has both the Father and the Son.'" These false teachers claimed a superior relationship with God. They said, we have things that you don't have. We have things that you need if you're truly going to be able to advance with God. And so they diminished the gospel.

They put the gospel into the background in order to bring up to the foreground their false doctrines. But that is all in the name of giving you an access to superior spiritual growth. But that is a totally wrong and false view. It's the promise of some kind of secret knowledge to bring you in that would give you something that you don't have.

Well, that's totally false. If you have the Bible and if you have Christ, if you have been born again into a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, the Bible says that you have everything pertaining to life and godliness. You don't need another book of Revelation. In fact, you can't have another book of Revelation and still keep the gospel. You don't need a bunch of traditions.

You don't need a bunch of magazines. You don't need another teacher supposedly giving you present day verbal revelations from God. All of that is going beyond the gospel and by going beyond the gospel, they leave the gospel behind, which is another way of saying they don't have God at all. That's what John is saying here.

Look at it again. Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, who does not abide in the simplicity of the biblical gospel, that goes beyond that does not have God. This is not a matter of competing equally valid ways to God.

It's not. When someone wants to put the Bible aside or elevate another book to the level of the Bible or above the Bible, they have gone beyond the gospel and they have marked out for sure the fact that they're not Christians at all, that they are agents of the devil. When they start to introduce other matters of authoritative revelation to you, they say, you need this book, we believe in this book is also being from God, understand that that is exactly synonymous with saying they could just as equally tell you, I am an agent from the pit of hell. Why don't you follow me? It's the same difference when they add revelation to the Scriptures, when they add authority alongside the Scriptures, they are declaring themselves to be ambassadors of the devil.

They're just using, cloaking it in different language. You see, Christian growth, Christian maturity does not mean that you leave the gospel behind as though you're introduced to that and then you move on to better things. What better things could there be than the gospel? What better things could there be than Jesus Christ? What better things could there be than God come from heaven in order to sacrifice his life for the sake of sinners? Full redemption paid at the cross. What could be better than the resurrection? What could be better than the ascension? What could be better than Christ's intercession for us at the right hand of the Father?

What could be better than Him coming back for His own one day? How can you go beyond that? Anything that takes you away from that is not moving ahead. It's not going further. It's a full-fledged turn the back and retreat from the truth. No, no, true maturity is simply going deeper into the truths that have been given to you in the gospel, growing in your understanding, growing in your love for them, growing in your obedience to them. That's where maturity lies. It doesn't lie in going elsewhere.

It lies in going deeper with where you're at. And so whenever someone comes to you and says, you need to listen to this, this stuff in addition to the Bible, your immediate reaction is no. Oh, but I have a secret knowledge. You need the knowledge that I have.

No, I don't. I have Christ and somehow I think that He's superior to you and to your dead false teacher. When you understand and you love Christ and you love the truth, these things start to animate you. They start to control your affections. And when things threaten the very foundations of the truth that you hold, you don't accommodate them, you resist them in the same way that doctors and hospitals throughout the ages have quarantined people with contagious infectious diseases.

They isolate them so that they can't infect others. That's what we do in a spiritual sense with false teachers. We do everything we can to marginalize them, to isolate them, to give them no platform to spread their lies. And we do it without apology. We do it in gladness, we do it in joy because it's a means of being faithful to the Christ who sacrificed His life to save us from our sins. Now, in light of the way that false teachers threaten our redemption, our reward, and our maturity, John now exhorts the woman directly. Look at verse 10 again. He says, if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, a teacher comes to you, someone presuming to teach to you comes to you and they don't bring the precise teaching of the gospel, don't receive them into your house and do not give them a greeting. Verse 11, for the one who gives them a greeting participates in his evil deeds. Now, going back to the way I introduced this, talking about the cultural context of this, understand that what John is saying is pretty precise in that context.

He's saying, do not extend hospitality to teachers like that. He said, when you do, when you give them a base of operation, you are participating in their wicked ministry. John is concerned to protect the truth. He says, we don't support men, we don't enable men to teach false doctrine. We don't enable men to compromise the gospel because love serves the truth. Truth determines the boundaries of the graciousness that we extend to the men around us. In that context, in that first century context, John had given a brilliant strategy to control the growth of false teaching.

Because if men had no place to stay when they got to a city, they wouldn't be able to stay there and set up shop. And so by informing these Christians and helping them understand the boundaries of true love, true biblical love, it had a way of freezing out these false teachers if it would have been followed consistently throughout the empire. They had no place to stay, they just had to keep going about like the wandering, aimless stars that they are that Jude talks about. Devoid of truth and bound for destruction, wandering about the face of the earth like their father the devil who also wandered about the earth, as he said in Job.

That's what we want to do with false teachers. Give them no place, give them no harbor, give them no island of safety. Now, that's the main sum of John's letter here. We've seen the opening greeting, the accepting nature of truth and love, the rejecting nature of truth and love. Now finally, we look at the closing farewell here in verses 12 and 13. John says, Though I have many things to write to you, I do not want to do so with paper and ink, but I hope to come to you and speak face to face so that your joy may be made full.

The children of your chosen sister greet you. I love the personal nature of that. I want to speak to you face to face. He loved this woman in an appropriate way. He wanted to see her, to give her more instruction, to build her up more knowing that that would be an occasion of mutual joy. He says, I could write it in letter, but I want to say it in person.

So I'm going to get to you when I can. It's a gracious way to end the letter. He has corrected her, but not in a way to diminish her, to demean her, to lord it over, but to affirm her as a sister in Christ who simply needed some additional instruction. Well, in light of this, and the question that always comes up in light of verse 10, don't give them a greeting, don't receive them into your house. The question is, well, what about the cultists who knock on my door, the men in black and white with the little name badges, or the Jehovah's Witnesses that knock on your door? What does this passage mean for those practical situations that you encounter?

Well, I'd say a couple of things about it. First of all, I think it's important to understand that 2 John is addressing a different context than the door-to-door proselytizers of false religion today. It's the context of overnight hospitality. You can't apply this directly and say, oh, this means that I shouldn't open the door to a Jehovah's Witness when they come.

It's not like that. But in terms of pastoral counsel to you, here is my counsel in light of what we've seen here in 2 John. My counsel is to admonish them and turn them away. Admonish them and turn them away.

I'll give you four reasons that I say that. Don't receive them into your home. Don't give them a platform in which they are the one instructing and you are the one listening.

That is where I think the line gets crossed when they're invited to our home. Say, okay, what do you have to say to me? You wouldn't any more than you would invite a killer in. Oh, well, what would you do with me physically?

That's an interesting gun. You know, I have a gun too. You wouldn't invite someone in to do physical harm to you. So don't invite them in and give them a platform to do spiritual harm to you. Number one, I think we underestimate the power of satanic doctrine. It is satanic doctrine to deny the deity of Christ. And Peter says that Satan is a roaring lion seeking someone to devour. So be aware that this is serious conflict that's going on here. Don't expose yourself to that unnecessarily. Now secondly, and related to that, is that most of us, I would venture to say, overestimate our biblical skill.

Sad to say, but I think that's true. And particularly as you're dealing with Jehovah's Witnesses who love to abuse the Greek language and distort it beyond any true understanding that it could possibly have. Very few Christians are in a position where they can refute that kind of false teaching on the spot. So why open yourself up to that kind of confusion that they can generate when you know what the ultimate goal is that they're after?

They want to deny Christ. Well, don't give them a platform to do that. Thirdly, the reason I say that is don't help them gain entrance to your unsuspecting neighbors.

Well, those Christians down the street spoke to me, and so I was just thinking that you might be interested as well. Well, when you close the door on that, you don't give them that means of deception. And so I would say this, fourthly, if you want to minister to those cultists graciously, but firmly warn them of their error, give them a tract or a CD, and pray for them as you send them on their way. That is the most effective way to do it. Don't put them in a position of being the teacher in the walls of your home when you know that what they're bringing is false doctrine.

Don't deceive yourself into thinking, well, I'm going to win this argument. I think that's the wrong way to go. Turn them away, give them something if you want to do that, but admonish them, you are teaching satanic, demonic doctrine, and you need to turn away from that in order to be saved. Make the issues clear.

Why? Because the truth about Christ is essential. The truth about Christ is worth defending, and we don't want to do anything that gives anyone that is propagating that doctrine a sense of success or a sense of equality and affirmation. And so with that, we see the thread of these teachers, we see how to respond to them.

I would simply close with this. What we've seen here is the absolute centrality of the gospel. We have seen the essential nature of truth. And if you're under the sound of my voice today and you do not know Christ, I urge you once again, come to Christ for salvation. Come to Him in personal repentance.

Turn from your sin and embrace Him as your Lord and Savior that you might be saved from your sin. And so we conclude a message called The Urgency of Rejecting False Teachers here on The Truth Pulpit. Next time, Pastor Don Green takes us to the book of 1 John and an examination of how a pastor in the pulpit should speak and act toward his congregation.

And Don, this is a matter near and dear to your heart. Because you've been a pastor for a good season of your life, how important is a pastor to his people? Well, Bill, you can measure the importance of church leadership by a simple standard. Look at all the attention that Scripture gives to it. Paul spoke often about the qualifications for being an elder.

James warns men against becoming teachers because they'll face a stricter judgment. My Christian friend, if you have a good pastor, I promise you he feels a weight of responsibility as he ministers to your soul. Let me encourage you, share the load with him this week through your prayers and through loving encouragement to him. Your care will enrich his ministry and encourage him in Christ. Thanks, Don. We will look forward to the upcoming lesson. And meanwhile, friend, do visit us at thetruthpulpit.com for a free download of today's message. That's thetruthpulpit.com. Now for Don Green, I'm Bill Wright. We'll see you again next time when Don continues teaching God's people God's Word in The Truth Pulpit.