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Contrast with the Wrong Process
Perhaps you hold to a belief and the opposition to it wears you down, something akin to what Paul warns in Galatians 6:9, “let us not be weary in well doing.” You grow weary of standing for the truth. Your belief is true, but as the world changes and degrades, it expects you to change. Maybe finally you give in or you gave in awhile ago. You didn’t want to fight that opposition and feel the hurt or burden of estrangement. Do those represent steps in the right process for belief change? No, they don’t.
In 1 Thessalonians 5:19-22, the Apostle Paul writes the church at Thessalonica:
19 Quench not the Spirit. 20 Despise not prophesyings. 21 Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 22 Abstain from all appearance of evil.
The Holy Spirit works through the Word of God. Prophesyings come from scripture. Someone can quench the Holy Spirit when not conforming to a preached passage of the Bible in his church. He should not despise that, but be quick to hear it, not to speak or get angry with it (James 1:19). However, he still proves what he hears and tests it. What he hears, he tests and embraces what is good, abstaining from the bad. He doesn’t succumb to false teaching, but if scripture does teach it, he holds on to that, and changes in accordance with it.
False Teachers and Teaching
False teachings are often alluring because they promise worldly benefits like prosperity, comfort, or a license to sin. This appeals to a person’s greed or sinful desires rather than glorifying Christ. A person might also be struggling with a trial, such as job loss or sickness, and be drawn to a message that promises an easy solution, like the prosperity gospel.
A false teacher and his message may enter an individual’s life in some fashion. This is often not an obvious or frightening event, but a subtle one. He does not announce his deceit but, like Satan, disguises themselves as “an angel of light.” A man may be charismatic, friendly, and seem sincere, using biblical language to cloak his true intentions. He might sympathize with resentment, antagonism, or a grudge against a former teaching and/or teacher.
Proliferation of False Teachers
It is easier to access false teaching than ever. Someone can surf the internet and find a youtube teacher who can smartly and simply explain a position that uses the Bible. Much teaching is very available now in many different formats and someone can customize his own positions without a church. These same people are able to monetize those teachings in the spirit of 2 Peter 1:3, “And through covetousness shall they with feigned words make merchandise of you,” who “love the wages of unrighteousness” (1:15). Sometimes the more extreme and wacky the teaching, the more viewers and greater monetization.
The monumental proliferation of teachers on the internet speeds up the deceit and pace of change. God can use the internet as a medium, but the extra scriptural context of it tends toward more bad changes, not good ones. Someone can do “his own research,” which often means cherry picking someone who “promise(s) them liberty, [while] they themselves are the servants of corruption” (1:19). A true church with the accountability of its discipline, ordinances, congregation, and authority is now a conventional means of acquiring scriptural truth.
The Conventional
Being conventional doesn’t make something right, but quite often good reasons exist for conventionality. The true church is not just tried and true, but is also the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). Christ, the Head of the Body (Ephesians 5:23, Colossians 1:18), also expects His followers, true believers, to fit into His body, which is visible and local.
Many modern reasons exist for wrong process toward bad change. The bad change conforms to the concept of slipping, like Hebrews 2:1 warns:
Therefore we ought to give the more earnest heed to the things which we have heard, lest at any time we should let them slip.
Someone, not anchored to the truth of Christ, slips. This is nautical terminology. It is a boat not tied to the harbor. Slipping means moving away from something with the foresight of floating too far away with the current and never returning.
Mutations from Mind Viruses
Perhaps you’ve witnessed steps in the wrong process toward mutation. You can see that something is very wrong. The next time it is worse. Finally it ruins someone forever. This happens to individuals, families, and then entire nations. How you change, matters. There is a right process and a wrong one.
Today you hear the terminology, “mind virus.” At first, it seems, it referred just to one mind virus, the woke mind virus. Now it seems that people use the words to describe many different viruses that burrow into and then stay in a person’s brain. They capture their imagination and change someone in the way the Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 10:5, becoming a stronghold.
Beware of Greeks, Bearing Gifts
My wife and I have spent at least four months actually living in England, visiting many castles. A large number of castles there have keeps, which is the inner most part of a castle, a stronghold or strongfast, the place someone resorts when the whole castle is under its greatest threat. When the stronghold falls, that almost always means the enemy took the entire castle. The castle is the person and the keep is the mind. The stronghold is a piece of thinking that holds a person, the castle, in a way of resisting good change.
It is a serious thing to allow something from the outside into the hold of a castle. You’ve heard the phrase, “Beware of Greeks, bearing gifts.” This is a cliche that refers to the story of the Trojan horse. Now it also contradicts another statement, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” because if the Trojans had looked into the mouth of the gift horse, Troy would not have fallen. Look at the gift horse in the mouth and beware of Greeks, bearing gifts. Speaking of your imagination, watch what enters that stronghold of you as a person.
More to Come