Deceived By Others Series

Age old adage, you can put earrings on a pig, but it’s still a _____.

Peter could spot a pig a mile away (not bacon) …someone who claims to be one thing, but is in fact, a completely different thing entirely. Someone who is not genuine, someone who is a fraud.

2 Peter is one FASCINATING book.

Ben spoke the last few weeks…BTW, I understand Ben chose to make fun of me a few times. No big deal, I always take the high road. LIGHTS

2 Peter CH 1 is a great call to live a passionate, Christ centered life. It’s a great, convicting read. Then you get to CH 2…and you feel like somehow you just lost your salvation. Somehow you’re not sure of anything. It’s dark, deep, heavy and entrenched with rabbit holes that some Christians like to chase and argue their way through for miles.

……and we have 30 minutes☹

I can either talk like an auctioneer…or I can pick and chose my battles.

Very few passages in scripture speak more directly to the church. Peter explains to us that the greatest danger we face as a church is NOT from the world without…it’s ROT from within.

Have you ever grabbed a perfectly good apple, taken a big bite…only to realize that thing was nasty to the core? Soft, brown…worms. Mmmmm….Mmmmm!

It looked fine? It looked perfect even…so how did the worm get in there? Worms don’t bore their way into apples. They lay their eggs in the blossoms before the apple even begins to form. Then, when they hatch…their already in there…with all the food they can eat. When they’re done and mature, they come out. And leave the apple undesirable. Nobody is using that apple again. The worm made sure of it.

Imagine a church like that! The early church was still in bloom when Satan laid his deceptive eggs of destruction. By the time Peter wrote this letter, there were already signs of rot in these churches where false teachers, false prophets and wanna-be’s were masterfully destroying everything and taking many people down with them.

Gnostics…mixed scripture with worldly teachings and immorality.

There were false teachers in the OT, all over the NT…it was nothing new.

Simply put…amongst other things, there were just straight up, people who were professing to be Christians, who went to church, who did ‘all the right things’ …knew all the right things to do…but inside, chose to deny God. They chose the world over Jesus.

Only you know if you’re fully committed to the cause of Christ, or if just want to look like it. You can be a worm and NOT EVEN KNOW IT.

Are you a worm in the apple or a seed? Worms in the church serve themselves and devour the fruit for their own personal gain, seeds mature and bring about life for the next orchard.

There are only two options! There are only two natures found in man…one is the sin nature we are all born with, the other is the heavenly nature we receive when we accept Jesus Christ into our hearts as Lord and Savior. TD Jakes said it best…we walk around in a sinful world and when sin gets in your heart, it’s hard to tell the Christian from the worldly crowd because sin is sin, no matter which nature it invades. That’s what makes 2 Peter so important!

V 1-3 Peter warns us that there will be false teachers who rise up amongst us who rot the church from the inside out. They profess to be Christ followers but secretly deny Him…these “Christians” glory in the privileges of Christianity but ignore its moral demands. This attitude infects many people.

The motive behind these worms actions…is greed. V3

…they are mixing the culture and politically correctness with the timeless truths of scripture. They are perverting the text for their own desire. Peter warns they will pay the price.

Have you fallen into this trap? Do you pick and choose what you want to believe in the Bible? You take ALL of it or you take none of it!

Two choices.. Sinful nature or heavenly nature. Heaven or Hell. Jesus, or yourself. Jesus=heaven, yourself=hell

THIS IS NOT A SCARE TACTIC.

16 – caught drunk by neighbor...dad came to work…boxing gloves.

I never drove so slow to get home.

These are facts. You either give your life, your heart and your soul to Jesus Christ, or you don’t. Plain and simple.

So who are the false teachers Kyle??????????

They may preach religion, they may even say Christianity is an option, but they will not point to Jesus Christ as the only cure.

They come in the form of pastors and even people attending churches, cult leaders, TV hosts, celebrities,. Sometimes you can spot them a mile away, and sometimes they seek to destroy the work of God quietly, strategically from within the church itself.