While walking around the block with a friend for some exercise and a chat recently, I mentioned that in ministry, one comes across people who are easily misled. They find themselves unable to believe what informed people know to be true and they are likely to latch onto the latest conspiracy theory as if it is God’s truth.
Given their lack of discernment, and attraction to every breeze of doctrine, the enthusiasm with which they adopt the role of Watchmen and Guide to others is a worry. Naïve rather than wicked, these semi-blind guides are a danger to themselves and those who find themselves in their orbit. As some sage wrote in another place, ‘False prophets [and naïve would be leaders] are not necessarily bad people. They just have trouble distinguishing between their own ideas and God’s.’
Tozer notes that ‘Some Christians have a positive genius for getting confused.’ He also observed that it is the sincere Christian who eagerly desires more of God who can find herself in a quicksand of delusion and false teaching.
‘Strange as it may seem, the danger today is greater for the fervent Christian than for the lukewarm and the self-satisfied. The seeker after God’s best things is eager to hear anyone who offers a way by which he can obtain them. He longs for some new experience, some elevated view of truth, some operation of the Spirit that will raise him above the dead level of religious mediocrity he sees all around him, and for this reason he is ready to give a sympathetic ear to the new and the wonderful in religion, particularly if it is presented by someone with an attractive personality and a reputation for superior godliness.’
Unless we read scripture prayerfully and consistently we will be unable to discern who is speaking truth and who is speaking a perversion of it. If it was good enough for Jesus who lived in His Father and the fullness of the Holy Spirit to have been immersed in scripture it is good enough for you.
Paul wrote to Timothy, ‘and how from infancy you have known the holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’ (2 Tim 3.15). The opposite to being wise about salvation is being foolish about the things of God.
The inability to distinguish between sound doctrine and a mere reputation for the same can come about because we happen to be of a naïve disposition – the kind of person who has a tendency to say anything and believe anything. As such we make good sales persons but not teachers of the word. When combined with a weak knowledge of the Bible and a lack of desire to read it in any depth we make problems for ourselves and those with whom we are associated.
We may pride ourselves that we are filled with the Spirit and that we hear from God. But the truth of any feeling, experience, vision or word we receive can only be validated by agreement with the scriptures. This is so because ecstatic experiences that come from God are indistinguishable from those that do not. This means that it is possible to mistakenly believe we have heard from God on some matter when we have actually heard from ourselves or from a demon posing as an angel of light. Thus Tozer writes,
‘The heart of man is like a musical instrument and may be played upon by the Holy Spirit, by an evil spirit or by the spirit of man himself. Religious emotions are very much the same, no matter who the player may be. Many enjoyable feelings may be aroused within the soul by low or even idolatrous worship.
So where does this leave you? Have you fortified your mind with Biblical discernment?
This highlights what can be a problem in churches today. Heart-felt praise and worship of Jesus abates our flesh and enables us to experience the reality of His Presence. Genuine praise and worship is a life – a life of intimacy with Jesus and careful attention to His voice.
‘Praise and worship’ in many churches can be stylized and formalized. Worse still it can actually be about us. Repeating ‘I love you more than life’ one hundred times may sound worshipful. Nevertheless it is about about us and what we aspire to do. It’s religious
‘Worship’ songs of this kind can lead us to an altered state that we mistake for the presence of God. What we assume is God is the presence of us. The presence of God is not us in a trance. Any ‘word’ that we assume is from God in such a state has doubtful veracity, since it looks spiritual but actually comes from the flesh. Reliance on such ‘words’ has resulted in believers doing great damage to themselves and others to whom they are connected. The solution is not to cease our praise and worship but to ensure that our songs are about Jesus – and to ensure that we are grounded in the Bible.
If the kind of ‘worship’ we engage in decreases or annuls our desire to read the Bible and discover His heart in scripture, we would do well to consider the whether the practices we have taken for granted are of God or merely of ourselves.
‘Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world’ 1 John 4.1 NIV.
