Heresy?

Hmmm, it must be something about this time of the year. Last year about this time I wrote some thoughts about how to avoid being deceived, and I am sensing a similar but slightly different leading for today. Today I want to write about how we ourselves can avoid becoming someone who deceives others. In the past, of course, the Church has been rather overboard on avoiding “heresy” and has focused more on right words more than right character. The result has been pretty ugly at times—just check church history. On the other hand, it is naïve to believe that our adversary isn’t devising all kinds of schemes to deceive and lead folks away from Papa and the Lord Jesus, so I want to write about how to be sure you don’t head for that nasty word, heresy (which is in its simplest definition bad teaching that leads folks away from God as He has revealed Himself in Scripture). As I noted in my blog on February 28 of last year, deception (heresy) is more a matter of character than of getting all the facts straight. (Click here to read it in a new window). Nowhere is this clearer than in Matthew 7:15-23 where Jesus teaches us that false teachers (heretics) will be easy to spot by their fruit (character and what their character produces!). May I suggest a few things that I believe Papa has shown me that will help to keep us on track? Consider the following. First, always walk in humility, especially towards God’s people past and present. It is clearly wise to live in humility towards believers who have walked before us in church history. It is dangerously arrogant to suggest that we have finally discovered truth and that all those before us were either duped or dufusses! Yes, there is perhaps a progressive restoration of the things of God taking place so that we are seeing things that haven’t been seen clearly since NT times, but that doesn’t mean that we jettison all that those in previous generations have to teach us. Indeed, some of the most profound things I have encountered about living a simple life in Jesus were written hundreds of years ago. There must also be humility towards believers who are in community with us today. One thing that has become more clear today than ever is that trustworthy revelation is not a private matter that can be discovered by oneself. No one has a corner on truth, and if other healthy believers are questioning my “beliefs” I will do well to listen carefully. Healthy people whose lives exhibit the character and life of Jesus merit our trust, and when they disagree with us about matters of life in Jesus, we do well to pay attention and humble ourselves before the community. Finally, notice that there is a humility towards God and His Word here as well. It is quite arrogant to think that God somehow lost control of His people, His truth, etc., until just now so that everything people believed up to this point was off base. Give me a break! God has always had a people who knew Him and knew His ways. He hasn’t lost control for a moment, and the scriptures and the basics of our faith have been His doing, maintained by His matchless power. Second, never leave the authority of Scripture. Most of the spiritual shipwrecks in church history can be traced to people deciding that they didn’t like some of what was written in scripture and adding their own filter to the Bible to rid it of objectionable material. True, we now know that the Bible isn’t designed to be a doctrine book that can club people into submission, but its revelation of God and how we are to live in Him is absolutely trustworthy. If we abandon it, then anything goes (and usually does). Note that the next point is closely related to this. Third, leave room for the mystery and majesty of God. For some reason human beings like to reduce the God of Scripture into a nice, well-behaved, perfectly tame and safe Being that we can always understand. But this leaves us with a God who is too small and strips Him of His majesty. That’s the problem with the surprisingly popular view of God that some suggest is in The Shack (but isn’t)—usually called Universalism. The problem with universalism (where everyone gets “saved” in the end) is that it ignores pages and pages of Scripture in order to come up with a “nice” but terribly small god who is nothing like the God I know! Any “god” who is formed by ignoring or rewriting scripture is too small, too tame, too manageable to be the God that the Lord Jesus came to reveal! I will opt for mystery and majesty, even when it hurts! Finally, never form understanding about what you believe on the basis of fear or suspicion. If “sound teaching” is really a matter of character, not just reliable facts, then it naturally follows that my belief system should be one that flows from the increasing wholeness that God creates within me. It will be responsive rather than reactionary, responding to the promptings of the Spirit and the Word and to the input of trusted others rather than reacting out of my hurts to the bad things others have done to me. It seems to me that a lot of strange directions in the past have come from hurting people whose beliefs were formed out of their hurt rather than wholeness. You and I will do well, then, to ask ourselves when we are forming our beliefs, “Am I making this assumption because of fear or suspicion or genuine trust in God and others?” And perhaps we may wish to ask, “Am I whole enough to be putting forth my thoughts at this point?” (By the way, you can discover the answer to this question by simply determining whether you feel the need to be forceful or not! The moment we find ourselves trying to coerce or overrule someone’s own ability to think and choose we are on dangerous ground and are revealing our own lack of health!). Well, I could write more, but that’s enough for now. I welcome (really) your thoughts! Stay gentle, humble and soft, dear ones, and all of this won’t be an issue for you! Tom, one of Abba’s children