2 Peter 2 -- Don't Let ME Be A False Teacher

Peter warned early Christians about false teachers.  The church was just getting started and already the problem was cropping up. 

In the middle of everything God was giving him to say about false teachers, Peter mentions Lot.  He said, “Lot was a good man, but because he lived with evil people every day, his good heart was hurt by the evil things he saw and heard.”  I struggled to understand why this was mentioned in a section about false teachers.  What God seemed to be telling me was that even a good heart can be corrupted by the evil around it, and that the teaching can be done by the society and culture around us, as much as by a teacher or preacher of a church.  I thought about the TV shows, movies, and video games that my boys are exposed to every day.  My boys constantly claim that they don’t pay attention to the cursing in the games and movies, but I’m reminded of a visit my family once made to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC.  They showed us a huge pendulum that was started each morning and, affected by earth’s gravity, it slowly turned in a circle, knocking down pegs one after another.  The amazing thing was what they said about the pendulum at rest.  They said that despite the weight of the pendulum, it would begin to swing back and forth if someone bounced a ping pong ball off of it repeatedly!  That’s what the continual bombardment of sin will do to us.

I think we have to be careful not to simply be on the lookout for charlatan preachers.  False teachers is the phrase Peter used, not preachers.  It could include even a well-meaning Bible study teacher.  My commentary gave the example of an unsaved person who has a change of heart and attends a church service where he or she expects to hear the gospel, but instead they hear sin condoned and permissiveness encouraged.  “It all comes as rather a surprise;  they had always thought that sin was wrong and that the church was against it.  Now they learn that sin is given religious approval!”

This says a lot about our being unapologetic in defending God’s Word rather than trying to water it down to make it palatable to the unsaved.  God has given them a sense that their sin is wrong, and they want to hear that reinforced.  When instead they hear only “love the sinner, hate the sin”, they can be less encouraged to change.

Father, help me not to be so concerned with stepping on toes that I actually teach a false message rather than tell it like it is in Your Word.  Allow me to have the words that Your Son would use if He were teaching today, and let those words cause change in the hearts of those You are drawing to Yourself.

Your Brother In Christ,

Gary Ford