Last week I stopped by the library
to pick up an autobiography that had been referenced in another book
I was reading. I didn’t know much about the author, but I
recognized her name as having written some Christian articles.
However, after reading about 80 pages of her book I’d had enough.
Yes, at one time she was a conservative Christian writer, and she
probably still considers herself a Christian, but she has adopted
some very unorthodox beliefs. The book started out with her
discomfort with the patriarchal heritage of culture and of
Christianity in particular. Some of her concerns are quite valid, and
I’ve experienced similar frustrations with figuring out where women
are supposed to fit in church leadership. But her solution was one I
cannot accept, as she embraced a rather radical feminism. I won’t
even dignify her position by sharing her name here. If I’d read the
book reviews on Amazon first I never would have picked up the book.
As it turns out, this experience
dovetailed nicely with the discussion in our Sunday school class
today from 1 Timothy 4:1-5. Verse 1 (ESV) states: “Now the Spirit
expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by
devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons.”
I’m sure this woman didn’t start out by adopting heresy. She
started with the good intentions of questioning what she’d been
taught and wondering if that was truth. Her first error came in her
understanding of Scripture. She stopped reading the Bible as God’s
authoritative Word and started reading it as a collection of stories
written by men and full of male dominance. She read it through the
lenses of her own feelings and discomfort rather than examining her
own feelings through the lens of Scripture. She essentially started
defining truth for herself rather than letting God’s truth define
her. She also started turning to non-Christian and pseudo-Christian
sources to explain her own experiences. Her belief system started to
adopt beliefs out of Greek mythology, Native American tradition,
mysticism, and various other sources. It seems like her “theology”
took in anything that made her feel empowered as a woman, regardless
of whether it was Biblically correct or not.
This is the kind of “departure
from the faith” that the Apostle Paul was warning about in the
first century, and it is increasingly prevalent in our culture today.
People are looking for whatever “truth” will make them feel
better about themselves and will help them identify their place in
the world. Even many who call themselves Christian are only in it for
the parts they like. Whenever the teaching gets uncomfortable or
convicting, they will move on to something else that makes them feel
warm and cozy.
Another book I’ve started reading
is Good Faith: Being a Christian When Society Thinks You’re Irrelevant andExtreme, by David Kinnamon
and Gabe Lyons. They share many statistics on what U.S. adults think
about Christianity, evangelism, and other religious activities. It’s
clear that few people want to accept that there is any universal
truth at all, much less that any one religion can point to Truth. For
most people, religion is only valuable in so far as it reinforces
their own desires and feelings. That also ties in with today’s
sermon from 1 Corinthians 6:12-20. If pleasure is the goal and master
of life then we will be slaves of our bodies, and it’s not
surprising that our culture is now legalizing whatever feels good.
That is the next logical step when there is no ultimate authority who
can tell us we’re sinning with our actions or attitudes.
In
a recent sermon, Alistair Begg quoted the old saying “God said it,
I believe it, that settles it,” but he rightly pointed out the flaw
in that statement. It should say “God said it, that settles it,
therefore I believe it.” Those of us who do still claim the Bible
as authoritative and who call Jesus our Lord and Savior need to be
careful to give God preeminence in all things, not just the parts we
like. There are some things in Scripture that make me uncomfortable,
but I have no right to remove them. There are also some areas that I
think have been misinterpreted by various denominational traditions,
but it is not my place to tell them they are wrong. They will be held
accountable for their beliefs and actions on the Day of Judgment just
as I will be. Some who claim to be Christians have wandered so far
from the true faith that they will be surprised to hear Jesus say
“Depart from Me, I never knew you” (Matthew 7:23).
May
we not be among those who make a shipwreck of our faith (1 Timothy
1:19), but train ourselves for godliness (1 Timothy 4:7), that by
testing we may know the will of God (Romans 12:2) through the Word of
God.
“Let us hold fast the
confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is
faithful” (Hebrews 10:23).
© 2016 Dawn
Rutan.
