A. Lk. 6:43-49, Mt. 7:15 shows that "knowing others by their fruit" of their words and actions especially applies to false teachers/wolves in sheep’s clothing in the Church.
1. In Matt. 7:15 it says to beware
of false prophets who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are
ravenous wolves. How do we know the difference between a sheep and a wolf in
sheep’s clothing? By their fruit, both their actions and their words.
2. Do they line up in
service to Christ and His kingdom, following God’s law and loving God and
neighbor as themselves? Or do they play the victim, twist God’s Word, and glorify
their rebellion?
3. Remember, Jesus is saying
this after choosing His 12 Apostles, but He isn’t saying this just to them.
a. A crowd of other
disciples are there, as well as those who are not yet His disciples but just
came to hear Him and be healed. Such discernment of wolves in sheep clothing is
the prerogative of all!
b. But today, I regret to
inform you, in conservative Presbyterian churches, an actual minister who dares
to call a false teacher a wolf in sheep’s clothing will receive church discipline
more swiftly than the actual wolf/false teacher, assuming the wolf/false
teacher ever receives church discipline!
B. In fact I have yet to see
the PCA discipline Greg Johnson, or the OPC discipline Aimee Byrd.
1. But a faithful minister
in the OPC at the time, Michael Spangler, was admonished and formally rebuked
for calling Aimee Byrd a wolf, some said only the presbytery has a right to say
such.
2. Yet we are told in our
text, explicitly in the Matthew text and implicitly here, that wolves are known
by their fruit, and Aimee Byrd had plenty of bad fruit for years. But men like
the distinguished Carl Trueman platformed her, she was embraced by the Alliance
of Confessing Evangelicals, etc.
3. They have not yet admitted
their error head on, and so anyone who decries Aimee Byrd apart from a formal
presbytery meeting is a bad guy, a renegade, someone who is acting like a pope.
4. Well I say the
presbyteries have become the actual “pope-byteries”! And may God bless the few
good ministers who spoke up about this when their conservative colleagues would
not.
5. Some ministers this week
have bristled at my sharp rebukes of Trueman’s bad teaching.
a. In essence, he said that,
although he would not personally agree with someone wanting preferred names or
pronouns that contradict their gender, it was okay to call someone by their
preferred name even though it contradicted their gender, but calling someone
their preferred pronoun was a bridge too far. The context was doing this in the
workplace, perhaps to save your job/not get fired.
b. I sharply disagreed and
said this man was not guiding us well on these issues, even while being treated
like a guru. At least one minister misconstrued me initially, thinking I was
saying Carl Trueman himself was a false teacher/wolf, when I only said that of
Aimee Byrd & Greg Johnson.
c. It seems that any
critique of a fellow conservative is looked at as denouncing that conservative in
every way, shape, and form. But that is not so.
C. There are necessary fault
lines that are NOT between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Satan.
1. Fault lines are forming
between those who are in the same denomination, between ministers who will in
the end enter the kingdom of God together as brothers in Christ.
2. It is most painful when
your own family, Reformed Presbyterian fathers & brothers, separate from
you because they believe in some way or another you are misbehaving or acting
out of line.
3. These disagreements have
much to do with our text, who/how is fruit to be examined/responded to?
4. Something seemingly so
small can wreak a lot of havoc, allowing false teachers to go unchecked,
causing division between godly brothers, churches, denominations.
a. If there is some comfort,
there might be a loose parallel to Paul and Barnabas’s disagreement in Acts 15,
where Barnabas wanted to continue ministering and take with him his cousin
Mark, but Paul refused because Mark had left them earlier in their ministry to
the various churches.
b. Such a seemingly small
division caused such great contention that it split up Paul and Barnabas.
c. In Acts 13:2, the Holy
Spirit Himself spoke and said to the church in Antioch that Barnabas and
Saul/Paul must be set apart among the other prophets and teachers that were
there “for the work to which I have called them”.
d. The Holy Spirit called
both men, they were full of the Spirit as they were ordained/had hands laid on
them, yet they had such a sharp disagreement they had to shortly split up from
one another.
e. Paul took Silas and went
one way, Barnabas took Mark and went another, Acts 15:39.
f.
But both continued laboring for the kingdom of God, and in Col. 4:10 we
see evident reconciliation as Paul writes saying that Mark the cousin of
Barnabas greets the Colossians, and Paul even says that if Mark comes to them,
to welcome him.
g. Sometimes family members
have doctrinal changes that divide and create fault lines, rifts in
relationships, even though both may ultimately be regenerate Christians on the
way to heaven.
h. So we must not see every
“fault line” as a divide between heaven and hell.
i.
But what we must NOT do is cease examining ourselves & others, with
love/charity, by their words & conduct, by whether or not they are bearing
the fruit of the Spirit in their words & deeds. For the purity and unity in
the peace of God within our churches depends upon it.
II.
Our actions are buildings that reveal our foundation.
(46-49)
A. And yet, in v. 46, we see
that even righteous words alone do not make someone a true Christian.
1. I recall thinking as long
as my high school friends said they believed in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior
that they were saved, no matter what foundation their actions showed them to be
building on.
2. V. 46, the word BUT shows
this sharp contrast between the words revealing the abundance of the heart, and
yet those coming to Christ call Him Lord but don’t submit to His Lordship in
their life.
3. Jesus says even if you
come to Me and hear what I am saying, that isn’t sufficient. You must come to
Me truly, hear me truly, and that is shown by doing the things that I say to
do.
4. Because if you do, then
you have good treasure in your heart, and that good heart treasure will be
opened up and poured out in your words and deeds.
5. Jesus in Mt. 15:8-9 says
of the scribes and Pharisees, quoting from Isaiah, “These people draw near to
Me with their mouth, and honor Me with their lips, but their heart is far from
Me. And in vain they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
6. He goes on to tell the
multitude that what really defiles a man is what comes out of his mouth, not
what is eaten and goes into his stomach. When even Peter is confused by this,
Jesus elaborates that what comes out of our lips comes from the heart and
defiles a man when it is wicked.
7. “For out of the heart
proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false
witness, blasphemies. These are the things which defile a man.”
B. How this relates to
Evangelical & Reformed/Presbyterian circles today: Greg Johnson and Aimee
Byrd.
1. Greg Johnson is a
practicing effeminate man, who looks and talks like a homosexual and calls
himself a “gay but celibate” Christian. His lifestyle and actions betray his
attempt at biblical words.
2. He does this though as a
wolf in sheep’s clothing, with subtle twists of God’s Word to try to make
himself sound closer to orthodoxy/biblical faithfulness than he really is.
3. Aimee Byrd has recently
left the OPC, but is promoted as a female teacher and is basically now a
protégé of Beth Moore. She tried to claim sound Reformed theology for years and
always deflected criticism by saying she was a “member in good standing” in the
OPC, but her actions and playing the victim card, her lifestyle, showed she was
not building on the foundation of Jesus Christ.
4. Some think she will fully
apostatize, or what is sometimes popularly but weakly called deconstructing
today, but I think it is more likely she will turn to Roman Catholicism or
something similar and continue her path toward feminine mysticism.
5. Women in the OPC have
been deceived by her and continue to praise her books and videos, saying Byrd
is their true teacher and decrying how she has allegedly been the “victim” of
so many bad OPC men, even though many of these weak ministers rushed to her defense
on her own personal blog when her false teaching was firmly being ridiculed and
denounced.
6. But our denominations
have failed to lovingly exercise church discipline, and the damage has been
done by each of these false teachers. Their words and deeds betrayed them if we
only paid attention.
7. And so these wolves have
feasted and devoured many souls, and continue to do so.
8. PCA and OPC ministers
today sometimes glory in how slow things move in church courts. Shame!
9. Byrd and Johnson now
openly support one another, and men like Jemar Tisby and other race hustlers
that have been promoted by men like Ligon Duncan continue to ravage Christ’s
Church.
C. Remember we were called
to remove planks from our eyes first. That’s half the battle.
1. We are also called to help others with their specks out of love after removing our planks.
Eph. 4:11ff. tells us that Christ gave some to be pastors and teachers to us so that we can have unity of faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God, so that “we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting, but, speaking the truth in love, may grow up in all things into Him who is the head—Christ— from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by what every joint supplies, according to the effective working by which every part does its share, causes growth of the body for the edifying of itself in love.” We are in this together in defending against the winds of false doctrines.
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