Daily Archive

False teachers don’t just serve themselves. They reject authority. Have you ever noticed this about false teachers, especially those that we know obviously who are false teachers? There is no accountability in their life for their ministry. It is them and them alone, and there is no accountability.

Now we know, as a teacher, I’m accountable first to God, but I’m also accountable to you, for you to check the word and to check me and to question me. “Are you sure? Did you mean to say this? Was that what you were preaching? Let’s discuss this.” Get back to the word and keep it to the word, because there’s accountability, because I’m handling the word of life, the word of God here, and it has to be handled rightly.

Will false teachers reject authority? They are their own authority. They don’t need anybody else to tell them what to do. They don’t need anybody to offer any checks or balances. It says here, “they despise authority.” This is outright rebellion. It starts with the fact that they reject the lordship of Christ. Christ is not obeyed as Lord. Have you ever noticed that too about the false teachers? Their christ is a puny, weak being. The christ that they preach, we can command with our words. He is another Jesus. We can make him do whatever we want if we say the right words in the right order and give the right amount that we send to their ministry, then Jesus will give us whatever we want.

They present Christ as serving us instead of being Savior and being sovereign. Luke 6:46 Jesus said, “Now why do you call Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” If you’re going to use the name Lord, understand what it means. It means master and in our case, it means the one who bought us with His own blood and we are His slaves. He’s bought us and we belong to Him. He is our master. And what did Jesus say when it came out to following Him? What did He say? He said, “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” But what does coming to him entail?

That’s Luke 9:23, “And he said to all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.” This verse gets quoted a lot and applied just a little. Because we don’t like to deny self. We certainly don’t like to take up our cross daily. What is Jesus saying? If you’re coming after Him, you first have to deny everything that you are and everything that you want outside of Him. And then you have to take up your cross, which means you have to die to self.

Don’t just deny yourself, but die to yourself daily. And then follow Me, walk after Me, obey Me, come and do what I have told you to come and to do. The false teachers don’t deny themselves. They don’t die to themselves daily. It’s all about themselves. I heard this about preaching years ago, and I still like the statement that if you hear a sermon and you leave and you think, “Wow, that was a good sermon,” then it really probably wasn’t. Because if it was a good sermon, you would leave and say, “Wow, what a great God!” We point people to Christ. We deny self. It’s not about building self up. There is edification, but understand, edification is not building self up, it is building others up or our being built up by the Lord. It’s denying what we want so that we could want what He wants. We have that conflict of desires.

There are times that we want what God wants for us. And those are good times, right? There are other times we want what’s wrong, and we usually know that, and we struggle with that. We should want to want what He wants. We deny ourselves. We take up our cross, and we follow Him. In that parable of building on the rock, Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and does them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain descended, and the rivers came, and the winds blew and fell against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. And everyone hearing these words of Mine and not doing them, may be compared to a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain descended, and the rivers came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.” What made the difference? Both heard, but only one did. There was one who heard and did. “Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does them” is the one who’s building on the rock.