“As a result, we are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming;”
E. K. Simpson, in commenting on this verse, points out that the Christian is to be ever a child and childlike in one sense of the word, pertaining to their faith, but not child-ish. In reference to verse 14 he says:
“What is here censured is the fickleness of children’s volatile moods, shifting like a kaleidoscope, dazzled by the first glittering bauble or flimsy distraction that catches their eye, and liable to be beguiled by every siren ditty of allurement within earshot.”
It is with a sense of chagrin that I must respond to Simpson’s statement with the observation that he has accurately described the larger population of today’s church.
Now I would suppose, human nature being what it is, that from the very beginning there have been individuals in the body of Christ who are perpetual children, in that they haven’t the mental capacity, or else they do not possess the personal incentive, to pursue maturity.
These, we will always have with us. There’s no point in complaining about them; they will come and go, and like the rest of us they will answer only to God for the degree of effort or lack of effort they put in to the spiritual disciplines that grow their faith. And of course, in the case of those who simply lack the mental capacity, it is our duty to care for them and teach them what we can, and love them through.
But there is a childishness that entire churches, indeed, entire denominations are guilty of clinging to, that is born of and proceeds from a certain lackadaisical attitude that says, ‘I’ve gotten on the Christian bus, someone else is doing the driving, and I have my Christian novel and my sanctified snacks, and I’m on my way to Heaven, I’ve reclined my seat and I have my lap blanket… don’t bother me.’
Now I’m not specifically or directly addressing the absence of faithfulness to duty here; not talking particularly about an unwillingness to minister or serve in some capacity.
But I am talking about an unwillingness to learn and grow in the faith, to allow themselves to be put in the way of the testings that will strengthen and mature them, and to a large degree, that unwillingness stems from a fear that they might be called upon by God or man, to shoulder the responsibilities that maturity calls for.
Now Paul is talking about results here in verse 14. He says, “As a result…”
Your different translations use different words to begin the verse, but they all point back to what he has said in the past 13 verses.
If we walk in a manner consistent with what we’ve been called to, preserving the unity among us and all, accountable to each other, take advantage of the gifts Christ has given to the church for the sake of our spiritual growth and maturity, then the result will be that we will no longer be silly, unstable, easily distracted and easily deceived children.
So putting this idea of results in the negative, when we insist upon staying childish concerning our walk and our spiritual growth, the result then is we fall prey to every charlatan’s scheme and every ludicrous doctrine that comes down the pike.
For proper emphasis we have to leave our text today and go somewhere else. I generally do not like to do that, but today it is necessary because Paul wrote something to the young pastor Timothy that spoke then of the future, but now speaks of the present, and I want you to see it.
Turn to II Timothy 4, and let’s read the first few verses of that chapter together.
“I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom; preach the word, be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires; and will turn away their ears from the truth, and will turn aside to myths.”
ENDURING SOUND DOCTRINE
Isn’t Paul’s choice of words interesting here? “…they will not endure sound doctrine”.
That word, anecho means to bear with; to put up with. In II Thessalonians the same word is used, encouraging Christians to endure trials and persecutions. So what Paul is telling Timothy is that the time will come when people will consider the teaching of sound doctrine as painful and detestable as persecution and torture.
Note please, the inversion of values between the church and the world. In an age when the world is preaching tolerance, and the acceptance of the differences between peoples and cultures and religions, and it is now increasingly unpopular to voice any opinion against certain values or lifestyles held by others, ~ within the so-called Christian community there is an ever-increasing intolerance for sound biblical teaching!
It is evident in the books that are reaching the best seller lists and fairly flying off the shelves. It’s the Christian novels, and the ‘how-to’ books, and the frilly devotional works and the testimonies of the celebrities.
It is evident in much of Christian music that molds Biblical doctrine like play dough for the sake of a rhyme or a catchy phrase.
It is evident in the very fact that there are so many churches, where a first time visitor can be easily recognized solely for the fact that he’s the only one there carrying a bible, because there’s never a need for one there, even during the sermon.
I had someone tell me that he visited a church of a mainline protestant denomination, and when he walked in he got stares from everyone. So much that he began to feel very uncomfortable and almost left. Then it dawned on him that he did not see one person holding a bible. So he looked around at the pews and there were no bibles laying on the pews. But he stayed. And half way into the sermon, he understood why there were no bibles in the hands of the people. They weren’t needed.
It is not the only time I have heard that story.
When I read these words, ‘will not endure sound doctrine’, a picture came to my mind of the crowd of Jews Stephen was preaching to on the day he was martyred.
In Acts 7 verses 54-60 we read of their reaction to his message; his doctrine; and we’re told they were so enraged that they were gnashing their teeth. Grinding their teeth. Then they clapped their hands over their ears, not wanting to hear him extolling Jesus any longer, and they rushed at him, carried him outside the city gates and stoned him to death.
They were unable to endure sound doctrine. And Christians, I have seen reactions from people when I speak the truth of the scriptures to them, that, although their reactions aren’t as strong as those of the folks in Acts, I certainly haven’t been stoned to death ~ yet ~, they were angry with me, and didn’t want to hear it.
And I’ve had them call me down for being intolerant, and closed-minded, and I’ve had them leave the church.
But let me ask you a question, and you decide for yourself what the answer should be.
If Paul has just listed missionaries and preachers and evangelists and pastors and teachers as Christ’s gifts to the church for the sake of building up Christ’s body and equipping the saints for service, and now he is telling us that we are expected to grow up; to no longer remain as children needing milk, but mature and learned and able to discern truth from deception, is it not my duty before God and you, to teach you sound doctrine? To preach the word? To be ready in season and out of season, and to reprove, rebuke, exhort, with patience and instruction?
If you agree, then it is my solemn duty to go one step further and tell you today that you have a duty before me and before God, to submit yourself to sound teaching and to the efforts of the Holy Spirit to use His truth to conform you to Christ’s image. It is your duty, to approach the teaching of His Word prayerfully and with a surrendered heart, so that He might do the work necessary in you to make you a working, fully functioning, healthy and coordinated member of His body, working in unity with the whole and building up the church. It is your duty.
It’s not a hard thing that you’re being called to. At least, not so far as the message is concerned, and your call to learn and then be faithful to the truth. Being a Christian in today’s world is not an easy thing. If someone tells you it is, he is lying or he is ignorant or he has an entirely un-biblical view of what the Christian life is supposed to be about.
But let me be clear that you’re not necessarily called to go to seminary and get a degree, or to pack your bags and head for some far corner of the globe. We each have to remain open to God and to hearing His voice, and obey Him if He commands; go where He sends.
The only thing I can tell you that applies to all of us as believers, and therefore I do not have to worry about going wrong here, is that you are not to remain childish. You are to submit yourself to being equipped for ministry, and exercise to make yourself ready to give an answer for the hope that is in you.
I ran across a quote some weeks ago that I immediately printed and set aside, knowing we would be coming to this passage soon. The author says:
“If the church were to lose its hierarchy, its clergy, its vast collection of learning amassed over the centuries, even the text of its sacred books, and had to face the world with nothing but the living presence of the Risen Jesus and its mission to proclaim the Good News to all nations and people, it would be no less a church than the church of Peter and Paul was. Perhaps, it might be more of a church than it is now.”
-John McKenzie
“Well Clark, doesn’t that contradict what you’ve been saying about the church needing growth and maturity and sound doctrine?” No! Don’t you see; that’s all they had!
The early church only had it’s doctrine! God became a Man in the person of Jesus Christ, born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, at the proper time He went about preaching the Kingdom of God and healing people and performing other miracles. Then one fine Spring day in Jerusalem, evil men nailed Him to a cross in fulfillment of prophetic scripture. He died, was laid in a tomb, and again, according to scripture, He rose bodily on the third day. He now lives to give eternal life freely to all who believe. His blood can wash away every stain of sin from your soul, and make you worthy to stand in the Father’s presence.
He’ll give you His Holy Spirit to guide and fortify you and teach you things concerning your Savior, who has promised He will return and take you to be with Him in a place He has prepared for you. He is the way, the truth and the life, and no one comes to the Father except by Him. Believe in Him today and you will be saved.
That’s doctrine. It’s all they had; that and a Holy Spirit-lit flame in them to tell the message everywhere. And they did tell it. In the midst of testing and torture, imprisonment and exile. They didn’t have seminars, or concerts, or movies or paperback novels, or television shows or celebrity guests, or committees or programs or even denominational distinctives to pound away at. No soap boxes, no axes to grind, no personal agendas. They preached the doctrine, the belief, that had changed their lives, and the church flourished!
THE TRICKERY OF MEN
Back in Ephesians 4 Paul is warning about some of the traps a spiritually immature person falls into.
The first we’ve really already covered. When sound doctrine is not sought or taught, then every shallow and good-sounding idea that comes along will carry the babe with it. There are some that come and go in cycles, each making their rounds every twenty years or so. The name-it-claim-it doctrine, or what I refer to as the “Magic Mouth” doctrine that says that as children of God we have the authority to claim things as ours and we will receive them. The reverse of that is not claiming something. That teaching says that you shouldn’t say, “I have a cold” or “I have the flu”, and certainly not “I have cancer” or any other serious illness; because if you do, you are claiming it for yourself and it somehow gives the Devil the power to inflict you with it.
It comes in many different costumes. The latest is the prayer of Jabez ‘thing’. Pray the prayer of Jabez daily, and God is somehow obligated to bless you, because you have all the rights that Jabez had; God being no respecter of persons.
That may not be the message or intent of the original author of the book, but that’s how it gets interpreted by the winds of doctrine.
There are others. And once in a while someone comes up with a ’new’ one, but for the most part Satan only has a few lies, you know. He just keeps re-dressing them and bringing them back to new generations of believers. Like Disney keeps doing with ’Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ and ’Bambi’.
In short, they all, at their foundation, no matter how they are decorated, appeal to the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, and the boastful pride of life. They all ultimately say, you have authority to do mighty things or to claim great things for yourself, and they all ultimately say you can have the comforts of this world and you can escape hardship and tribulation if you have the formula. Say the right words. Subscribe to the latest ecclesiastical fad.
The preachers of this nonsense are tickling peoples ears. Telling them what they want to hear; what will fall gently on their ears and smell sweet in their nostrils. And they are successful, because people are fulfilling the predictions of Paul and accumulating, gathering, these teachers to themselves, because they want to believe the myth.
But here in Ephesians 4:14 I want you to take note that there is a deliberate deception going on. There may be some cases, perhaps many cases, where false preachers are deceived themselves, and propagate falsehood because they have not yet seen the light themselves.
But Paul is warning about the charlatans. The crooks. The false prophets. They use trickery. Another interesting word. Only time it is used in the New Testament.
It means ‘dice playing’. (Gr. - kubia)
The implication is not just that they are gamblers. About the only way to cheat in dice games, is to load the dice. You can’t see it, and if it’s done well and then they are handled well, you can’t detect it. The only way you can catch on, is if you see the same die landing on the same number over and over again. And by then you’ve suffered greatly.
They are cheaters. They are deliberate and practiced liars. They don’t wear plaid polyester suits, pork chop side burns and white shoes. They don’t talk like W.C. Fields, and they don’t twist their mustache like Oil Can Harry
They speak softly, they win your trust, they flatter you, they appear to be deeply interested in your welfare, and their message sounds oh, so very good. And they sweep you away, get you caught up in the fun and the music and the attention and the fanfare, … and then they take you for all you’ve got and leave you spinning, wondering how you got in such a mess.
Once in a while we hear of a Jim Jones, or a Vernon Howell, deceiving hundreds and hundreds of people to the point that those people end up losing their lives for their deceivers. But the reason we hear about them is that they become newsworthy, only when they lead to disaster. They are not as isolated and infrequent as you might think.
In the past I’ve told of how I went to my parent’s house on leave from the Air Force and during that stay surrendered to the Lord. I was twenty two years old at the time. When I arrived in Merced, California, I discovered that there was a woman evangelist at my father’s church.
She had come as a traveling evangelist, and had convinced my dad to let her hold a week-long revival at his church. Now, she wasn’t winning him over with her good looks. I would estimate her age to be in the late fifties or even early sixties, and she was obese and did not dress well.
But she must have had a very charismatic personality, because when I arrived it was at the end of that week, and she had managed to get him to agree to another week of revival services, which, by the way, a lot of people were attending.
Now this could turn into a long and complicated story, but let me just draw out for you the parallels of this account, to every other one I’ve encountered of cult groups and their rise and fall. This was all put together later, of course. It wouldn’t have gotten so far if any of us had seen problems as they developed.
This woman somehow managed to keep my dad so busy that he was getting little sleep. The days were long and active, and most nights she would call him from the church phone where she was staying, in the wee hours of the morning, and tell him that the Lord was burdening her heart with something, and would he please come over to the church and pray with her. Sleep deprivation. One of their tricks.
Something else we pieced together later was that she always ate at least one meal a day with us, and she always insisted on helping. Hind sight showed us that she always prepared one of the dishes, whether it be to heat the corn, or mash the potatoes, or whatever; but she never ate from the dish she prepared.
After she was gone, a search of the quarters she had been sleeping in resulted in the discovery of some herbal substance in a plastic bag. It was turned over to the Police, but since I went back to Louisiana where I was stationed there were some details I never learned.
She also had my dad, and therefore the rest of us through him, convinced that the Lord had promised her that my dad’s ministry was going to blossom into a great ministry because of her involvement there, and to express any doubt about her, or disagree with her, or hamper what she was doing in any way would ruin the whole thing. God would ’withdraw His Spirit’. Another common trick. They make you afraid to contradict them in any way.
She convinced him and therefore us through him, that my mother was secretly practicing witchcraft, and was using voodoo to try and ruin the ministry and destroy my dad’s future. My sister and I stood guard while my mother packed a suitcase, and we escorted her from the house. Kicked her out! She stayed at the home of another pastor in town until this thing was over. Another trick; divide and conquer. Put leaders against each other so they feel they only have the deceiver to trust.
As I said, there is so much detail that could be told; but let me tell you how it ended.
I had to go back, as I said, to Barksdale AFB, and the drive to Los Angeles airport was about 5 hours long. My dad and my sister took me. After I got back to Louisiana, I received a call from my sister, and this is what she had to say.
On the way out of the Los Angeles basin, and going over the mountain pass referred to as the Grapevine, my dad’s car stopped running. They coasted to the side of the road and he checked under the hood, but could find nothing wrong. Nevertheless, the car would not start. All they could do was to wait for someone to come along with the ability to contact a tow service for them. (This was before cell phones or car phones)
They were both groggy, they agreed, so they reclined their seats and fell asleep. About four hours later, they were awakened by a Police officer tapping their window with a flashlight. He said he had been trying for about 15 minutes to awaken them. After he was satisfied that they were not drunk, my dad tried the engine, and it turned over with no hesitation. Surprised but happy, they continued on their way.
Over the next four and a half hours, my dad and my sister talked in depth about what was going on at home. It is agreed upon by all of us that they must have been kept under a perpetual drug-induced condition, until, by virtue of this long drive and their long nap they had an opportunity to become clear-headed.
By the time they reached Merced, they had figured out exactly what Katherine Brown was up to, how they had been deceived, and how close we had all come to a real tragedy. When they pulled into the driveway this woman was standing on the church lawn to greet them. When she saw the expression on my dad’s face as he got out of the car, her eyes got as big as 16 inch pizzas and she turned and ran to her room in the church. A very short time later her bags were packed, car hastily loaded, and she was on her way down the road.
Folks, I firmly believe that one of the reasons God moved my wife and I to Colorado, and the first town we lived in this state, where we served in the church there for about two and a half years, was to avoid something of the same nature happening there. I believe that, because in the process of the two churches dissolving and starting a brand new, united congregation in that town, I saw the signs of a like situation beginning to develop, and with the prayerful help and cooperation of others in places of leadership, it was headed off before it got a foothold.
There are charlatans out there, believers. Jesus warned of false prophets, and they are out there. But the message of the New Testament epistles, is that the Spirit-filled believer in Jesus Christ, has a duty to go on to maturity. To avail himself/herself to the resources that God has provided for their development, to submit themselves to the teaching of sound doctrine, and let Him make them into strong, mature, spiritual adults, equipped for the work of ministry, to the building up of the body of Christ.
Brothers and sisters, each and every one of you, from the youngest to the eldest, bears the responsibility of diligently and faithfully absorbing the Word of God, abiding in it, asking His Spirit to take it significantly to your mind and heart, so that you might be able to stand firm on the Rock of God’s truth and not man’s, and be a discerning, wise, effectual, fruitful worker in the Kingdom.
The people who float from church to church; who leave a church because they will not submit themselves to teaching beyond the basics of the faith; who are offended by God’s Word when it condemns sin and calls for repentance and commitment and faithfulness and sacrifice and submission, will never, never know the deep joy and blessing that belongs to the sincere student of the scriptures. It can’t be described to them, and it is as far from their grasp as spiritual reality is to the unsaved.
But if you know that you are a Christian, born from above and headed for Heaven, then it is my duty to admonish you and encourage you, “to grow up in all aspects, into Him, who is the head, even Christ.” And we will go on to talk about this more in coming weeks. For today let’s just ask the Lord to renew our hunger, and refresh our commitment to devour His Word with vigor, and to seek His face with intensity, that He might grow us up to the measure of the stature which belongs to the fulness of Christ.
