Where Are the Bereans?

This question is for the Church of 2017: 

What about this picture is growing increasingly rare?

The Setting: 

Paul and Silas enter the region of Berea and head straight for the synagogues, preaching their message of salvation through faith.  They present their too-good-to-be true gospel, but instead of immediately accepting it, the Bereans "received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true" (Acts 17:11).

That means they searched the Old Testament books to see if Jesus the Messiah was found there. They refused to embrace a new-and-improved teaching simply because it sounded good. It had to pass critical tests before they allowed themselves to be influenced by it. And because they knew God's word, they recognized that Paul's words were validated by the "whole counsel of God"(Acts 20:27). ONLY then did they accept this new message with gladness. 

The Question:

Where are today's Bereans? We are the most literate generation in history to be the most biblically ignorant. Scriptural counterfeits are everywhere, deceiving the masses.  A flamboyant personality can rip a verse or two out of the Bible, scroll it across his TV persona, and millions instantly pronounce him a "man of God." Who is checking his doctrine? Where are the Bereans who know their Bibles and will cry out, "Not true!" The few remaining Bereans have been buried under the weighty labels of "Judgmental," "Pharisee," and "Legalistic," their voices discounted as being among the unenlightened. 

So when a movie pretends to explain God by introducing universalism, shelving the Bible, and cancelling the need for repentance, do we become Bereans? No.Instead, Christians create Sunday School lesson plans around its theology. When a megachurch prosperity guru cuts-and-pastes verses from his Message Bible until the unrepentant are convinced that God only wants them to believe in themselves, do we become Bereans? No. Christians crown him "America's Pastor." Sadly, that is the kind of "pastor" America wants.  

So fellow believers, the Bereans are calling to us, rebuking us, and challenging us to follow their example. Heresy quickly overtakes gullible souls without a Berean heart.  The most seductive heresies are those that make us feel good and insist that love is God's sole characteristic. Those sermonettes sound like encouragement; they seem to define love. They are what we want to hear and they're ALMOST true. But if we don't know how to rightly divide the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15), we are easy prey for the enemy's counterfeit. 

How do you think the Bereans would have responded if Paul had presented Yahweh as a woman? Or what if Paul's gospel was that Jesus went to the cross so that they could believe in themselves? Do you think the Bereans would have accepted Paul or his gospel? 

Me neither. Let's become Bereans! 

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Destroy Them!

 

 We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God… 2 Corinthians 10:5

“I'm not sure Jesus was the Son of God.” “Hasn't science proven the Bible false?” “Dr. Bigbrains at the University of Skepticism says that God is a man-made concept.” Those are examples of “speculations and lofty things” this verse talks about. God designed our minds to feast on knowledge. He created us with the passion for discovery. However, we can become overly impressed with our own ideas, even when they contradict truth. This is nothing new. Satan started this line of thinking in the Garden of Eden with the words, "Has God really said...?"(Gen. 3:1)  Every skeptic since then has simply repackaged the lie. 

 Speculation occurs when we see something in the Bible that makes us recoil. We immediately seek a softer solution, even if that means compromising the truth. Lofty things are ideas that swell inside our heads until we worship our own intellect—or the ideas of others. We secretly disagree with God and consider our way higher than His. When we spot such thinking in our own minds, we have a choice: we can continue to let that thinking grow until it derails us, or we can do what this verse says to do—destroy it! God won’t tolerate a watering down of His word to appease our sensitivities. He gave us His word so that we can demolish satanic suggestions, and He expects us to know it well enough to recognize error when we hear it.

Jesus showed us how to confront satanic speculation. Read Luke 4:1-13 and let Him show you how it is done.

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New And Improved Christianity

We live in a culture that craves the "new-and-improved." As soon as a product is widely accepted, its creators produce a new-and-improved version of it. Products or ideas are often marketed with the claim that "this ain't your granddaddy's" version.

Unfortunately, cultural Christianity has adopted this same strategy. Some, in the name of relevance, have cherry-picked the Bible to create a new-and-improved religion that the first followers of Jesus would never recognize. Because our postmodern majority wants a god that fits comfortably into its lifestyle, we are now saturated with a wildly popular, new-and- improved, "this ain't your granddaddy's" version of Christianity. This new brand offers the fragrance of spirituality without the substance. Whereas the Jesus of scripture required obedience and surrender, this modern pseudo-Jesus just wants to hang out with us and provide goodies. This new brand of Christian-lite boasts a god we may pacify rather than obey. The modern American god desires to partner with us to fulfill our dreams, rather than work out His plans in us.  Where historic Christianity emphasized holiness and repentance, this new-and-improved version stresses self-esteem and personal fulfillment. This is a god who negotiates with us about our sin, rather than judging it and requiring us to stop it.

The addition of a few hand-selected, non-offensive Bible verses gives this imitation a semblance of authenticity. However, this new version is nothing but cheap plastic. It has no foundation. Every belief system must have a foundation upon which it is built, or it is merely conjecture. The foundation for true Christianity has always been the Bible--the whole Bible, not sanitized excerpts from it. And when we study the whole counsel of God (Acts 20:27), we realize that there is no way to make God's truth new and improved. It is already timeless and perfect. And His way is the only way to God. He did not invent a new way to pacify the self-obsessed. 

It was this uncompromising gospel that got Jesus and his followers murdered. There is very little in today's new-and-improved, have-it-your-way version of so-called Christianity that would have gotten anyone martyred.

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Family Fights

If you grew up with siblings, somebody at some point heard a variation of these words: "You're not really in our family. Mom and Dad found you and they're gonna take you back pretty soon." Depending upon the age of the victim, this news resulted in a tearful race to Mom or a fist fight.

Unfortunately, the family of God hurls similar accusations at each other. The availability of the Internet seems to provoke an insatiable desire to take these family fights embarrassingly public. It doesn't matter whose name you Google. From world-renowned Bible scholar to up-and-coming preacher, everyone is under attack by someone. The word "heretic" is tossed as liberally as confetti on New Year's Eve, often by a young seminary student with a short-sleeved dress shirt and a big Adam's Apple, holding court in a musty church basement with a camcorder. However, bigger names are now joining the mudslinging, as though any one person holds the patent on every truth. Doesn't the Bible call that pride? No matter how minuscule the doctrinal difference, disagreements are seen as grounds for name-calling and the childish taunt: "You're not in our family!"

Heretics and false teachers do exist. In abundance. They should be called out because they are preaching "another gospel." Any teachings that directly contradict scripture, such as universalism or questioning the divinity of Jesus, should be rejected because they are touted by those who are merely neighbors and not brothers. But much of the inner-family conflict is just that--inner family. We are brothers and sisters in Christ, redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, headed to the same eternal home. We are going to disagree. All families do. It's healthy. It means everyone has a voice and everyone is thinking about what matters.

Big Brother Jesus knew this was coming. It is rather telling that the theme of His longest recorder prayer in John 17 was unity. Of all the requests He could have made of His Father in those hours before the crucifixion, He asked "that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me..." (v. 23) Isn't it interesting that the way the world will believe in Jesus is when it sees our unity?

Is being "right "on some non-essential issue more important than loving our brothers? Is proving our point before a scoffing world more important than demonstrating the humility and kindness that should characterize the family of God? Jesus didn't think so. If unity among His family is that important to Jesus, why is it not more important to us?

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New and Improved. Really?

Contrary to what is passing as the Christian message these days, Biblical Christianity has always maintained that:

• We are not called to love ourselves; we are called to lose ourselves (Col. 3:3).
• We are not called to pursue personal fulfillment; we are called to pursue God (Phil. 3:14).
• We are not called to understand and agree; we are called to trust and obey (Acts 5:29).
• We are not called to insist that God cooperate with our will; we are called to surrender our wills to cooperate with God's (Gal. 2:20).
• We are not called to have faith in our own faith; we are called to have faith in a Sovereign God (Is. 46:10).
• We are not called to excuse continued sin because we are "broken;" we are called to be holy (1 Pet. 1:16).
• We are not called to pursue our 'best life now;' we are called to lose our lives for the sake of Christ (Mark 8:35).
• And we are not called to recreate the message of the cross as Me-centered; we are called to preach the whole "counsel of God" which has always been Christ-centered (Acts 20:27).

We are called to "study to show ourselves approved unto God" (2 Tim. 2:15) so that we can recognize "another gospel" when we hear it and reject it (2 Cor. 11:4).

I wonder what the apostles would say about this modern man-centered, feel-good, bumper-sticker distortion of the message they gave their lives for?

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Who Has the Strange Fire?

 
Satan never tires of finding ways to divide and conquer the members in the body of Christ. Jesus' greatest desire for His followers was that we be one. Unified. As He and the Father are unified. Yet, within Christianity there is a never-ending drive to divide. Right-fighting has often replaced sound teaching. Mud-slinging and insistence that one ideology is the ONLY correct understanding of God's Word is drawing more attention from the world than our real message of hope and salvation.

The most recent enlisted man in this flesh-induced battle for supremacy is none other than well-respected Bible scholar John MacArthur. It grieves my heart, as it must grieve the heart of our Lord, that he is so driven to demolish what he believes are wrong teachings that he loads a sawed-off shotgun and fires without aiming. His intended target may be the radical wingnuts who claim to represent a different ideology. But with his self-named "Strangefire Conference,"  Dr. MacArthur mows down some pretty stellar brothers and sisters such as R. A. Torrey, A. W. Tozer, D. L. Moody, Dr. John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Dr. Jack Hayford and thousands more. Strangefire seems an odd name for his conference, since thousands who disagree with his stance see the strange fire as coming from his camp, aimed at taking out millions whom he professes to love.

I discovered the following article and found it to be a respectful challenge to Dr. MacArthur's conference. It also includes some facts the distinguished doctor wants to overlook in his zeal to defend his position.  While we are all disheartened at the extremes that some take in the name of the Holy Spirit, there have always been extremists in every camp. That doesn't mean that anyone who agrees with them on any point is as wrong as they are. I'm surprised a man like Dr. MacArthur doesn't know that and it makes me wonder:Has spiritual arrogance replaced a teachable heart?

Try this article and see if you agree: Is John MacArthur Right?

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