Dances With Wolves

 
 
 
 

He looks like a harmless canine, doesn’t he? You just want to hug and pet him and love on him. As a dog owner, I can relate. How gentle! What soft fur he has! What a sweet demeanor he seems to have! What a loving animal. Most people would look at this picture and think to themselves, what a lovely companion this animal must be. But there is more to this animal than meets the eye. There is something inside him that we cannot see. Indeed, for many, there is something inside him that most people just don’t want to see.

Gee, I wonder what that is dangling from him mouth.

Just ask the animal it used to belong to. Oh wait, he’s torn to shreds with a good portion of him in the wolf’s stomach by now and more to add to that. When we allow our emotions to occupy areas of our lives they are not intended to occupy, the results can be tragic. In Acts 20, Paul warned the elders from Ephesus that ravenous wolves would come into the community and tear people to shreds with their false teachings. In fact, Paul said some of them would prove to be ravenous wolves, not sparing the Christian community.

Make no mistake about it, wolves are real and they have an agenda: to rip Christians and their beliefs to shreds. Satan is described in Scripture as a roaring lion that walks around seeking whom he may devour. The reality of false teachers is everywhere. And the obvious reality of the situation is that it is getting worse by the minute. There are a number of Christian teachers with seemingly positive images in the Church, being endorsed or seemingly endorsed by good men. These men fail to understand, or they seem to fail to understand that it is criminal to send a child out into the woods filled with blood-thirsty wolves. And it is just as criminal, even more so, to send naïve Christians into woods filled with the likes of false teachers that liter the evangelical landscape today.

The common denominator among all these wolves is “self.” The wolf is interested only in feeding himself, on your flesh, without mercy. These ministries all begin with men, place man at the center, and end with man as the final judge.

The above teachers are engaged in a variety of heresies and heterodoxy. These heresies range from the heresy of anti-trinitarian modalism to the corrupt and greed-filled word of faith movement. These teachers can be found ignoring God’s mandate for male leadership, human sexuality, and even the basic exclusivity of the gospel. And yet, for some reason, our pastors fail to warn their churches about them openly, you know, like Paul did. Christians, even in solid churches continue to attend their conferences, buy their books, and subscribe to many of their false teachings. For some reason, modern Christians see no danger in dancing with these wolves. T.D. Jakes teaches a heretical view of the nature of God and many modern Christians downplay this, shrugging their shoulders and saying, something like:

Is it any wonder that modern American evangelicals don’t take heresy and heterodoxy seriously? They have been taught by men like Rick Warren for years now that doctrine doesn’t matter. That relationships are all that matters. My former pastor, Rob Decker in a disagreement with me over confronting open sin in the church told me he was not the church’s Holy Spirit. Another pastor I know refused to discipline a woman in the case of illicit divorce because he thought it might split the church. These men are builders of their own little empires. They seem to care far more about preserving their kingdoms, and expanding those kingdoms than they do the spiritual health of the community. A weak church can hardly stand up to the secularism we see sweeping our culture at the present moment. But I am far more concerned with the secularism sweeping the church. We are dancing with wolves and no one seems to notice.

Thank God for men like John MacArthur, Scott Oliphint, John Frame, Paul Washer, Phil Johnson, and others. These men are like this man:

When the wolf circles, they respond like the men of God they are! What will you do?