Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Okay, you guys can open now to Second Peter Chapter two.
[00:00:13] Now this week we're going to cover a similar topic overall to last week.
[00:00:18] But hopefully what Jacob taught last week from Deuteronomy 12 and 13 will be helpful. As we think about false prophets and teachers in Second Peter two, we kind of see the Old Testament background, that this was not a new thing for the church in the first century. Still not a new thing today.
[00:00:36] But as I was thinking about it, I was thinking about a time when I was young and I listened to a lot of Christian rap. Does anybody listen to Christian rap?
[00:00:48] A few people kind of do, yeah. I used to listen to it a lot.
[00:00:52] I'm not saying I don't ever listen to it now, just listen to other stuff more. But by the time I was in college, I kind of saw myself as done with that. Not with Christianity, but with their rap.
[00:01:05] I was just thought it seemed corny. I'm not saying that's true, but that's what I thought.
[00:01:12] Now I have found a lot of actually really good music since then. But in my younger 20s, as I started to discover more, better even Christian rap, I was especially influenced by a guy that some of you have probably heard of named Shy Lin.
[00:01:28] Has anyone heard of him?
[00:01:31] I know maybe some people that have been to crosscon probably know who he is.
[00:01:35] But Shy Lin, he's not just a rapper. That's way, that's like a down the line side job for him. He's a pastor, a husband, a father, and he would actually rap theology in a way that was teaching theology in a poetic fashion in like a four minute version. So in four minutes he could probably teach you more than I could in half an hour.
[00:01:58] Now, I had recently at this time, again in my young 20s, college age, I had recently watched a documentary that was really popular called American Gospel, which exposed the dangers and teachers of something called the prosperity gospel or prosperity theology. And around that time, I don't. I think he probably wrote this before. Maybe it was around that time I heard a song by him called False Teachers which he listed, you know, Joel Osteen, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, T.D. jakes, Joyce Meyer and others by name as False Teachers. And that was kind of revolutionary to me to think, oh, this is a category that I should think about.
[00:02:38] And it's even important enough that names should be named because it's very serious.
[00:02:44] I even think if he wrote that song today or even within the last five years, he would certainly include a pastor or two from the city of Tulsa. Not Far from here.
[00:02:54] Now, my point is that this chapter of Second Peter is incredibly relevant to us.
[00:03:02] It is near to us. You know, it's not just the big names of people around the world. There are people in our very city that would fall under this classification as false teachers.
[00:03:13] Now, the main theme, remember, of Second Peter is exactly caught up in this. The main theme of Second Peter is that false teachers will be destroyed in the day of the Lord.
[00:03:22] That's high stakes.
[00:03:24] So what exactly is a false teacher? That's what we want to find out.
[00:03:28] So this chapter about false teachers is right in the middle of the letter. And it is the heart of his intention.
[00:03:36] He wants to warn these Christians about false teachers arising among them.
[00:03:42] So as a review, remember, in chapter one, Peter called the people to not just obtain faith he was assuming they had, as they're Christians in churches, but to confirm their faith and their calling in the Lord. And they could do that by being devoted to God's Word.
[00:03:58] Such devotion to God's Word should then help the people identify false teaching. When they come across it.
[00:04:04] They truly are devoted. They'll know when someone is teaching astray from it.
[00:04:10] And some of the false teaching, probably a lot of it, was relevant to the coming day of the Lord's return, which will be unpacked even more next week. But for this chapter, he turns to false teachers and how they hide, why they're dangerous, and what their fate will be in the day of the Lord. So the main idea of second Peter 2 is this. False teachers are sneaky and dangerous.
[00:04:35] False teachers are sneaky and dangerous and will be punished by the Lord. False teachers are sneaky and dangerous and will be punished by the Lord.
[00:04:46] So let's look at Second Peter, chapter two now.
[00:04:52] But false prophets arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.
[00:05:06] And many will follow their sensuality. And because of them, the way of truth will be blasphemed. And in their greed, they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep. For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment. If he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah a herald of righteousness with seven others when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly, if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes, he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly. And if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked. For as that righteous man lived among them, day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard.
[00:06:02] Then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment. And especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.
[00:06:14] Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones. Whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord.
[00:06:26] But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction.
[00:06:40] Suffering wrong is the wage for their wrongdoing.
[00:06:43] They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime.
[00:06:47] They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions while they feast with you. They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin.
[00:06:57] They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained for greed. Accursed children forsaking the right way, they have gone astray.
[00:07:08] They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing but was rebuked for his own transgression. A speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet's madness.
[00:07:22] These are waterless springs, mists driven by a storm. For them the gloom of utter darkness has been reserved for speaking loud boasts of folly. They entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error.
[00:07:39] They promise them freedom.
[00:07:41] They themselves are slaves of corruption, for whatever overcomes a person to that he is enslaved.
[00:07:48] For if, after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome the last state has become worse for them than the first.
[00:08:00] For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness, then, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment, delivered to them what the true proverb says has happened to them. The dog returns to its own vomit, and the sow, after washing herself, returns to wallow in the mire.
[00:08:20] So again, false teachers are sneaky and dangerous and will be punished by the Lord.
[00:08:27] Now, based on this passage, we not only can learn certain lessons about false teachers in Peter's day and in ours. But we can also follow three warnings. So these are going to be the three main points. Three warnings. We're going to kind of jump around the passage and take them as they come.
[00:08:46] So the first one is this. Watch out for false teachers.
[00:08:50] Watch out for false teachers.
[00:08:55] Now, in order to watch out for false teachers, we need to know a couple things. We need to know first, what they teach, and second, from where they come.
[00:09:04] So we'll take those in order. First, from what do they teach?
[00:09:09] Peter says in verse one that they bring in destructive heresies.
[00:09:13] And the sense here is that they sneak them in.
[00:09:17] They weasel these teachings into the church. They smuggle them in unnoticed.
[00:09:23] And they are not just sneaked in. They're not just heresies. They are destructive heresies, which in Peter's use refers to false teachings that lead people to destruction.
[00:09:34] They're going to destroy your eternal life.
[00:09:37] They lead to destruction because these teachings encourage people to deny the second coming of the Lord and therefore to live however they want to live.
[00:09:47] How is denying the second Coming relevant to their holiness?
[00:09:52] Well, here's the logic. If Jesus isn't coming back to judge, which is what the false teachers taught, then why does it matter how you live your life? There's no judgment. He's not coming back. Do as you will.
[00:10:04] That was the false teaching that they were hearing.
[00:10:08] And these destructive and false teachings even deny the Master, the Lord Jesus Christ.
[00:10:14] Verse 2. They also blaspheme the way of truth. Verse 10, they blaspheme the glorious ones in heaven. Verse 11, they blasphemously judge the Lord. And verse 12, they blaspheme about things they are ignorant about.
[00:10:29] They blaspheme constantly.
[00:10:32] But verse 14 even adds to what they they teach. They're adulterous. They love sin. They're greedy. They boast not in the lord. And verse 18 says they seduce and entice others into sin and blasphemy all things said. Then with all that together, it seems pretty straightforward for watching out for them. Don't follow the teachings of men or women who are evil and sinful and blaspheme God check. Hopefully you can check that off.
[00:11:01] But it's not necessarily always that simple.
[00:11:06] We also need to know from where they come.
[00:11:09] Verse 1 says, There will be false teachers among you.
[00:11:14] He's talking to members of churches. There'll be false teachers among you.
[00:11:19] Verse 13 says they're reveling in their receptions while they feast with you. They're at your dinner table, they're in your church.
[00:11:28] And as Peter says in verse 1, false prophets also rose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. So when he says false prophets arose among the people, he is looking back, as he does a lot in this chapter, to Israel, Old Testament Israel. That's why we covered Deuteronomy last week.
[00:11:46] Just as there were false prophets then, who from the nation of Israel came up to preach or to prophesy falsely, there will be false teachers among you.
[00:11:57] So these false prophets, they would speak untrue things, saying, thus says the Lord. And they would say things that the Lord did not give them to say.
[00:12:07] God does not lie. He did not speak through the false prophets.
[00:12:11] Well, in the same way, there are now false teachers in the church or in supposed churches. And coming into the church, they might be pastors or laymen. That means average members. They might be new believers or believers that were raised in the church.
[00:12:30] The threat of a false teacher is greatest among the people.
[00:12:35] Not when it comes from someone from the outside, but when it comes from within. That is the greatest danger.
[00:12:40] Someone on the outside almost certainly has less influence on you than someone you know and love have seen grow up. Maybe you've grown up with them.
[00:12:52] So that's the danger, especially for these Christians then, these false teachers, they come up among us, among our friends, sometimes among our family, or even just among our churches.
[00:13:04] And this doesn't happen everywhere. I'm not trying to fear Monger, but it can happen.
[00:13:09] So the spreading of false teachings is almost always an inside job.
[00:13:15] It's an inside job is someone who says, I'm a Christian, and this is what the Bible says. It's not someone who is openly attacking the faith. They might not even think of themselves as attacking the faith.
[00:13:27] Sometimes it looks like a supposed believer finding the real truth behind the Bible.
[00:13:33] Maybe they say things like, see, we've been lied to.
[00:13:37] The Bible is actually loaded with errors.
[00:13:41] It was just pieced together over time. You might hear it said, or maybe there's no way that Moses actually wrote Genesis. There's no way that a Red Sea was actually parted. There's no way that the walls of Jericho fell as people shouted, there's no way a man was actually raised from the dead.
[00:14:02] And sometimes it is sneakier.
[00:14:05] But I would remind us for a minute, if a man did raise from the dead, he believed all of those stories. He believed the Bible was wholly true. He believed Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He believed everything we are taught to believe about the Bible. If he really did raise from the dead gives me a lot of confidence. But sometimes it's sneakier than those obvious assaults at doctrines. There once was a local church that I've heard of at one point that was not guarding against heresies.
[00:14:33] One member read some old church history figure and decided that the ancient heresy of Pelagianism was actually true People, you know, which this, I'm not assuming you guys know what that means. It just means that people can know and trust in God with absolutely no help from grace.
[00:14:53] Now that is sneakier, yet still sinister.
[00:14:57] You know, false teaching, and it denies Scripture plainly by grace you have been saved.
[00:15:05] We must affirm there's grace.
[00:15:08] So it can come in a lot of forms. I can't list all the examples we could encounter, but the point is we need to watch out for false teaching.
[00:15:18] So number two, then, guard against false teachers. Not just look for them. We need to guard against false teachers.
[00:15:26] So here's where I'm going to draw on Jacob's sermon last week. He gave us three tools from Deuteronomy 13:4, which were walk with the Lord, obey the Lord and serve the Lord. Walk with the Lord, obey the Lord, serve the Lord. If you just go to Deuteronomy 13:4, it's pretty clear in the text now. We're going to get even more practical more every day. But all these that I'm going to go through are kind of just ways that we do those three tools.
[00:15:55] So the first way to guard against false teachers is to, as the Bible says, be wise as serpents.
[00:16:04] If you look at verse three, we see that in their greed they will exploit you.
[00:16:12] We need to be wise. Now this phrase, wise as serpents, comes from Matthew 10:16, where Jesus says, behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves, so be wise as serpents and as innocent as doves. So we need wisdom to stand against the trickery and deceit of false teachers.
[00:16:30] So Jesus in Matthew 10, he is warning about persecutors who will come. Those are the wolves in that context. But we can apply this to false teachers, who, interestingly enough, are also referred to as wolves elsewhere.
[00:16:43] We have need of wisdom. We don't want to be duped because we're unfamiliar with something in the Bible.
[00:16:51] We need wisdom. And most importantly, the Bible tells us that Christ is the wisdom of God.
[00:16:59] So firstly, we need Christ.
[00:17:01] If we want to be wise, we need Christ.
[00:17:05] Christ saves you from your sin, but we need to know that there is more than that. Second Peter 1, 3, the beginning of this letter says, his divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness through the knowledge of him who has called us to his own glory and excellence.
[00:17:23] So what this is saying for us is that in Christ you have what you need, including what wisdom to guard against false teachers.
[00:17:35] So I'm not encouraging you to go and figure it all out on yourself. Make sure you know every single answer there could possibly be given.
[00:17:43] James 1, 5, 6 says, if any of you lacks wisdom and we all lack some wisdom, right, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him. But let him ask in faith.
[00:17:57] So ask Christ in faith for wisdom. This will help you to avoid and guard against false teachers.
[00:18:05] Second way we can guard against them is to the second half of Matthew 10:16 be innocent as doves.
[00:18:13] So the punishment of false teachers and prophets, as you saw as we read, we'll continue to talk about it's serious.
[00:18:21] We'll look more closely in a few minutes. And because their punishment is so severe, we should seek to be innocent and to avoid them, to be clean and pure away from them. Seek the Lord in all you do to be innocent as doves and do so humbly.
[00:18:41] As we go through life, we need to walk according to the Lord's wisdom, following the path he lays for for us.
[00:18:51] Third way to guard against false teachers don't be entangled with the world don't be entangled with the world.
[00:18:58] Verse 20 of our chapter says, for if after they have escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome.
[00:19:11] So the false teachers are doomed in part because they have supposedly left the world to enter the church, yet they have become entangled in the ways of the world. Yet again, James 4:4 warns us that whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.
[00:19:29] Students do not choose the world.
[00:19:32] Don't choose friendship with the world, because that is choosing enmity with God. That is what the false teachers have done.
[00:19:41] You can imagine how choosing to be a friend of the world is related to false beliefs. It can lead to false beliefs. Maybe I can explain.
[00:19:51] The more you associate yourself with the world over the Lord, the more you become like what you most love.
[00:20:01] If you love the world the most, you're going to become like that.
[00:20:05] The more I love I mention them a lot. The Oklahoma City Thunder. The more I might dress like I work for the team, the more I Love donuts, the more I might start to look like a donut.
[00:20:18] We begin to look like what we love.
[00:20:21] So the more you love the world, the more you will look like the world.
[00:20:28] When you love the world the most, it really is tempting to bend what the Bible says so as not to offend the world.
[00:20:38] Nobody wants to offend what or whom they love, so don't love the world.
[00:20:44] Number four then Fourth way to guard against false teaching is to hate your sin.
[00:20:50] Hate your sin.
[00:20:52] We see that proverb in verse 22. It's similar to one recorded in Proverbs 26:11 which says, like a dog that returns to his vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.
[00:21:04] It's probably safe to say that you do not hate your sin enough if you find yourself continually going back to still has a place dear to you in your heart.
[00:21:16] That stuff we need, and we need the Spirit's help for this. It should be to us like vomit.
[00:21:24] I've told it before. I won't retell the story of when I let my dog eat his own vomit so I wouldn't have to clean it up because that was gross. But maybe if you have a dog, you've seen them do this. Returning to your sin is like a dog eating its own vomit.
[00:21:39] Returning to your sin is like a pig cleaning up and then going right back into the mud pit.
[00:21:45] When you sin, do you confess it and try to clean up your life?
[00:21:50] Well, that's good, but then do you return to the mud again?
[00:21:56] I think your issue might be it might be that you don't hate your sin enough. But more importantly and more probably you don't love Christ enough. He needs to be our supreme treasure.
[00:22:09] He is maybe not any better in our eyes than vomit or a mud pit, but he should be. He should be our prized possession.
[00:22:19] We need to love Christ supremely.
[00:22:23] And the more we grow in this, this is something to grow in. You don't achieve this all at once, but the more you grow in this by God's help, the more you will hate your sin.
[00:22:33] The more you look to Christ, the more your sin goes to the periphery.
[00:22:37] So love Christ and hate your sin.
[00:22:41] Fifth way to guard against false teaching is to know your Bible and to know it in context.
[00:22:46] You need to know what your Bible says and when you don't, you need to be humble and ask or look.
[00:22:54] I think a lot of us suffer from biblical illiteracy and the reason for that is just a result of a cherry picking type of reading. This is more of maybe a personal Opinion of mine, you know, a verse of the day, flipping to a random page, they can be helpful. The spirit can illuminate those things to you, but they're not in the long term a helpful way to read your Bible.
[00:23:21] To open your Bible randomly and be able to read it profitably, you need to know it like the back of your hand. You need to know what's going on in there.
[00:23:30] So my suggestion is to read the Bible cover to cover and then do it again, and then do it again.
[00:23:37] Read the Bible all the way through, know what it says, know the storyline, the arc, the different books, how they contribute to the overall theme of redemption in the Bible.
[00:23:47] That will help us to know our Bible and to know it in context. And we can guard against false teachers.
[00:23:53] Now, the last way to guard against false teachers is to trust the Lord. Trust before you doubt.
[00:24:00] One mark of faith that I've seen is that when you hear a point or an argument that you can't answer, you don't just fold. Your faith doesn't crumble. You may not know the answer. You may be confused or struck or.
[00:24:14] Or you may just be at a loss. You don't fold. It doesn't make you doubt just because maybe some guy with a priest's collar on TikTok gave a persuasive argument.
[00:24:25] A persuasive person can make anything sound good.
[00:24:29] Faith instead holds its ground and looks for answers in a faithful place.
[00:24:35] So look for answers in a faithful place.
[00:24:37] If someone is raising an issue about God or the Bible, I can pretty much guarantee that he or she is not the first person to do that. And there are a lot of valid Christian responses.
[00:24:50] I personally love receiving questions from you guys on Wednesdays and other days. That's a good place to start. I might have somewhat of an answer, and I'll probably know someone who does.
[00:25:00] So ask questions, seek answers in faithful places.
[00:25:06] Now, all of this is just an application of this chapter, how we can guard against the false teachers that Peter is talking about.
[00:25:13] And it's really kind of Peter's implication. He's explaining their judgment, but the aim is for them to guard against these false teachers.
[00:25:21] But what he's mostly discussing is what will happen to them. So if our first point discussed how they look, we're now kind of talking about how to guard against them. We'll finally discuss what happens to them and what happens to those who follow them.
[00:25:36] So this is main point number three. Avoid the fate of false teachers.
[00:25:42] Avoid the fate of false teachers.
[00:25:46] So I've kind of written out four different fates or things that will happen to them from the text and number one. So fate number one, they will not be spared.
[00:25:57] They will not be spared.
[00:26:02] If you look at verses 4 through 10, you will see a lot of examples of God's judgment.
[00:26:10] These are from the Old Testament. We're not going to get into all of these stories, but the angels sinned, they were cast into hell. They were put in chains of gloomy darkness when the whole world was evil except for Noah.
[00:26:23] God saved Noah and his family, only eight people, but destroyed every other person.
[00:26:29] Sodom and Gomorrah were evil cities, and yet only Lot and his family were rescued from those before they were burnt to a crisp.
[00:26:38] And in these verses, by the way, Peter makes a point to not just talk about the judgment of God and how he but also how he rescued Noah and how he rescued righteous Lot.
[00:26:50] So just in case, as we read this, you're worried that you might be caught in the crossfires of God's judgment against false teachers and the wicked in general, you can be confident because God knows how to save. If he can destroy every person on earth with a flood and save eight people, he can save you from judgment if you trust in Him.
[00:27:09] If you're counted righteous through your faith, then you can trust God. He will save you. But God does save us through judgment. There is judgment for the wicked.
[00:27:22] So rest assured if you're in Christ, that you will be saved.
[00:27:26] False teachers and their followers be sure that you will not escape judgment.
[00:27:33] Fate number two, they will be punished until the judgment.
[00:27:39] Kind of See that in verse nine, Peter gives us a peek here into kind of his theology of the end times and, and something called the intermediate state, which is just a term that refers to where people are now. Until Christ returns. When people die, what happens until Christ returns? Well, when people die, the spirits of those in Christ go into his presence in some way, and the spirits of The Wicked, verse 17, will be cast into the gloom of utter darkness. It's like a prison of spirits.
[00:28:13] Now, why is there an intermediate state?
[00:28:16] Why don't people just go straight to heaven or to hell? That's what I always thought might be what a lot of you have always thought.
[00:28:22] Well, the reason is that we have to wait for the final judgment.
[00:28:26] We must wait for the Lord to return.
[00:28:30] This final judgment will come on the day of the Lord when he comes again to earth. And in that day, everyone who has died and is raised to life again, and the living also, they will all be judged by Christ and will either go to hell in judgment, or will live on the new earth or heaven.
[00:28:52] False teachers are in the gloom of complete and utter darkness until they are brought out to be judged and sentenced to eternal punishment.
[00:29:03] Now, this might seem obvious, but let us do whatever it takes to avoid that fate with them.
[00:29:10] We know that they will be punished until the judgment when they are finally sentenced.
[00:29:17] Fate number three, then they are and will be slaves to corruption. We see that in verse 19.
[00:29:26] They promise freedom, but they themselves are slaves of corruption.
[00:29:32] They serve corruption by corrupting the very word of God and what it teaches by introducing their own ideas, their own interpretations.
[00:29:42] Anyone that does this has been overcome by their slavery to sin, and only repentance and faith will rescue them.
[00:29:51] Fate number four, the last one. Their last state will be worse than their initial one.
[00:30:00] Their last state will be worse than their initial one. We see that in verse 20, specifically verse 21 also. For it would have been better for them never to have known the way of righteousness than, after knowing it, to turn back from the holy commandment delivered to them.
[00:30:17] What he means here is that our first state is a state of sin. We are born into sin. We're all born sinners and deserve judgment. But this means that for false teachers, even that judgment for being sinners is better than what the false teachers will receive. For false teachers, there is an extra measure of judgment reserved for them.
[00:30:40] He doesn't give us details what this would look like. He probably doesn't know. We know that there is something extra in store. This is a very serious topic.
[00:30:51] This is probably why Jesus can say, but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone fastened around his neck and to be drowned in the depth of the sea.
[00:31:05] Causing others to sin, leading others astray into false beliefs, leading especially children and other new believers into sin, is a gravely serious sin in itself, and it will be dealt with by the Lord because he is a just God.
[00:31:24] So, students, if we learn anything from 2nd Peter 2 is that false teachers are sneaky, they're dangerous, they can be persuasive, but they will not escape the punishment that is due them.
[00:31:35] Now, is there a hope for you? Are they so sneaky that I don't really have a chance of knowing? I've not read my Bible. That's going to take me forever to do.
[00:31:44] Well, there is hope.
[00:31:45] There is.
[00:31:47] I don't think these punishments are reserved for those who mistakenly believe. Wrongly believing the wrong things is still bad. We want to always Be correcting what we think about God. But when you're confronted with the truth by the Bible or by a Christian friend, you should repent and trust the Lord and His Word.
[00:32:06] You can escape from all this, but only through the knowledge of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
[00:32:13] So love him supremely and prize His Word like a treasure. And if you do this, you will find yourself in a safe and secure position.
[00:32:24] Watch out for false teachers who often come from within the Church, who teach deceptive things and twist the Gospel.
[00:32:32] Be on guard against them so that you too won't be deceived.
[00:32:37] And therefore you can escape any punishment that they will receive.
[00:32:41] To trust and hope in the day of the Lord, for it is coming.
[00:32:46] He is coming to judge the living and the dead. And while this is an ominous and daunting warning to false teachers and non believers, it is the great hope and comfort of Christians. Those who have believed in Christ, who lived perfect, died and rose again, who ascended into heaven. And we wait for even now.
[00:33:05] If you trust in him, you don't need to fear that day. If you love and cherish Christ, if you have found him, he will look at you as if you are spotless, innocent as a dove.
[00:33:17] You'll receive glory and honor that Christ himself receives from the Father.
[00:33:23] What a wonderful hope.
[00:33:25] So before you worry about what beliefs you have and if they're true or not, you need to turn from from your sin and put your faith in Christ first.
[00:33:35] And then through the Spirit and through the Church, he will guide you into all truth.
[00:33:41] Let's pray.
[00:33:43] Father. Thank you for your word.
[00:33:46] Lord, we hear this warning about false teachers.
[00:33:50] Lord, give us eyes of wisdom and discernment to see them, to guard against them, to avoid them.
[00:33:58] Lord, for anything falsely we might believe or assume. Lord, please correct that in us so that we can honor and glorify you and most importantly, even know you better. That we can glory and be blessed in the knowledge of you.
[00:34:12] Lord, we admit we need your help by the Spirit.
[00:34:16] And Lord, we also ask that you would save sinners here, you would convert them, give them faith and repentance, that they would turn to you and trust you. That they would see the truth and be able to understand the Word.
[00:34:30] That they would love you and your word and cherish you above all things. We pray this all in your Son's name. Amen.
