From Shallow Teaching to Doctrinal Purity
Those of you who fly frequently are all too familiar with the standard preflight routine. Before the flight takes off, the flight attendant grabs the cabin microphone and goes over all the important in-flight safety information with the passengers. Of course, you’ve heard the information many times before and you know nothing is going to happen. At least, that’s what I’m usually thinking in my mind. One of the last times I flew there must have been other people thinking the same thing because several times throughout her presentation the flight attendant had to say things like, “I need your attention, please. I need you to look up here at me.” I was sitting in a row of seats next to an emergency exit and when it was over, she asked for a verbal commitment that we had understood and that we would do what we need to do in case of an emergency. So I said “yes” and other people on my row said “yes.”
Well, let me tell you, I feel a little bit like that flight attendant with the message this morning. We’re going to go through a lot of information. Some of it may seem familiar to you; some of it may not seem necessary now. There is going to be some times where I feel like saying, “I need you to look up here. I need you to pay attention.” Then when it is over, there is part of me that is going to want a verbal commitment that you understand this, because it is essential to what we do here as a church. We’re talking about doctrinal purity, and while that may not sound that exciting, it is at the core of who we are at First Church. So we’re going to go through a lot, and I need you to fill in the blanks and take your notes. If you didn’t get notes when you came in, then maybe write some stuff down on a piece of paper. I think these might be the type of notes you would want to keep in your Bible and just kind of evaluate the messages and the sermons that you hear—whether at this church or another church—based on what we’re going to talk about today.
A few years ago in Kansas City, there was a pharmacist by the name of Robert Courtney who was convicted of diluting cancer medications in order to make a profit. Over a period of about nine years, he diluted some 98,000 prescriptions that affected around 4200 patients. Seventeen of these cancer patients died because they received this diluted formulation of their chemotherapy. In that time period, he made $19 million on this fraud, and he was sent to prison for thirty years for diluting this medication. So here is a man who was entrusted with the responsibility of handing out this life-saving medication, but he diluted it to the point where it couldn’t save.
As sad and tragic as that story is, there is part of me that wonders if some of that same thing is happening in churches across our country this morning. Where churches that have been trusted with the good news of the gospel that brings salvation have diluted it to the point where it doesn’t really save. They’ve watered down the Bible and they’ve kind of softened Scripture. The Bible talks to us again and again, as a church, about the importance of watching out for false teachers.
In the city of Corinth, there were these teachers that were saying that the spiritual body and the physical body were separate entities. For them the application looked like this: You could be a Christian and follow Jesus, and you could still do whatever you wanted to sexually; that those two parts of you…those things could be separate…your spiritual self and your sexual self. And we still have that type of false teaching today—that you can be a Christian and still do whatever you want to with your body. Or maybe it looks like this: You can follow Jesus but that doesn’t need to impact your financial decisions. And you can be a Christian, but you need to keep that separate from your political views. All of these things are false teaching. They were struggling with it then; we have it in our churches today.
Jesus warned us that there would be false teachers who would be pretty convincing. He even said they would do the miraculous. But you need to watch out for them, Jesus said, because they are really wolves in sheep’s clothing.