The Greatest Danger to the Church Still

PRAYER OF CONSECRATION Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  1 John 2:18–19 (NIV) Dear children, this is the last hour; and as you have heard that the antichrist is coming, even now many antichrists have come. This is how we know it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us. CONSIDER THIS What do you think is the greatest threat to the church of Jesus Christ? Hypocrisy? Apathy? Bad preaching? Sexual immorality? Weak faith? My take? Thanks for asking. I think it’s immature faith. John is especially concerned with those who lack maturity in faith. Allow me a brief sidebar about Christian maturity. In terms of faith, maturity has little to do with how long one has considered oneself a Christian. Many times, people who have ardently followed Jesus a short time are more mature than those who have sat around in church all their lives. Maturity is the fruit of a life consistently immersed in the Word of God and the Spirit of God. It is not signaled by a certain level of knowledge but by a growing discernment. The metric for Christian maturity is not competent skills or great gifts, but humility and holy love. The secret to maturing in Christ comes in the quality of one’s trusting abandonment to him. When John says “children” don’t think kids, but people who aren’t yet mature in their faith. Immature faith works like a magnet to attract false teaching. Immaturity can be like a weak immune system. False teaching is like a virus, taking advantage of the body’s weakness. The trouble with false teaching is it has an air of plausibility to it. People not steeped in Scripture and the Spirit are most susceptible to buying into false teaching or following after false teachers. John calls them “antichrists” because of their false teaching about Jesus Christ. Read this familiar passage from Ephesians through these lenses of maturity and false teaching: So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming. Instead, speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work. (Ephesians 4:11–16) Now look at how Paul addresses this issue with the Christians at Colossae. So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ. (Colossians 2:6–8) The greatest threat to the twenty-first-century church threatened the first-century church as well. Immature faith. Immature faith opens the door to false teaching. False teaching leads to false faith. It desecrates community. It destroys unity. The apostles knew what was at stake and they would not abide it. We can’t either. One of the biggest myths to combat false teaching is the myth of compromise—you know, “agree to disagree.” We water down Jesus’ invitation to discipleship by creating a compromised two-track system where Jesus can be one’s savior but not one’s lord. Such false teaching destroys unity; people will often seek a compromise to recover unity. It never works. In our attempts to salvage unity in our church structures, we do grave damage to the body of Christ. There’s only one way to deal with false teaching: maturity. We must grow in maturity by consistently immersing ourselves in the Word of God and the Spirit of God so that we can discern the truth from the lies. THE PRAYER  Lord Jesus, I will for my life to be more deeply rooted in you. I long to be established in you. Today, I am responding to your knock and opening the door to a new way of knowing you. I hold nothing back. I don’t know what all this means, but I trust you. I pray in your name, Jesus. Amen.