Biblical Discernment: How to Identify False Teaching in Today's Church

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Before we start today's episode, I want to take a moment to tell you about usefultogod.com. From online courses to free downloadable study guides, I'm confident you'll find something to help you live faithfully in today's world. You can also check out some of my books, including Christian Resistance, Serpents and Doves, and my most recent contribution, The D.L. Moody Essentials Collection. Coming this fall, we're also running a German Reformation tour. The tour runs from October 30th through November 9th, and we'll be visiting sites from Berlin to Munich. The booking deadline for the tour is May 31st, and spots are filling up fast. If you're interested in learning more about the Reformation, World War II, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, you can check out the tour at the link in today's show notes. As always, if you find this podcast valuable, take a second to like, share, and leave a positive review. It really does make a difference. And if you haven't yet, subscribe to our YouTube channel for even more content to equip and encourage you. Now, let's get into today's episode. Hey, everybody, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm James Spencer. I'm joined by Nate Girardano. And today we're going to be talking a little bit about false teaching. False teaching is, I wrote an article for Christianity.com. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. But as I kind of dug into this area of false teaching, I found it sort of compelling and wanted to have a quick conversation about it. So, Nate, welcome. Always glad to have you on the show, man. Yeah, yeah. Good to be back. Thanks for having me. So, dude, you know, when I wrote this article, one of the things, you know, I'm an Old Testament guy, right? So I think everybody kind of knows that. And and so my head ultimately went to false prophets first. And what I found when I did my my investigation of this biblically was false prophets and false teachers aren't exactly the same thing. False prophets in many ways are almost easier to identify. If what they say doesn't come true, then they were false. Now they can lie. They can they can omit things. They can make things overly simple. But ultimately, the false prophets, really what they're trying to do is they're trying to serve as the oracles of God and represent God within usually a political context, the context of a nation, informing rulers about what they should or shouldn't do. And so we have a lot of prophets that are coming in to sort of advise, you know, for instance, different Israelite kings. And as they're coming in, they're either affirming a king's strategy or disaffirming that strategy. Some of the prophets were for hire. Balaam is one of the, you know, prophets that we see in the Old Testament, particularly in Numbers 22, I believe, to 24. And he's paid by a gentleman named Balak to go and curse the Israelites. God gets a hold of him and says, hey, don't do this. You can't curse them. They're blessed. And so Balaam refuses to curse them. But still, we see in the New Testament, even later in the Old Testament, that Balaam is sort of a prophet for hire, a hired gun, and that this this movement toward prophets, this willingness to sell one's prophecies is not viewed as a positive thing. Right. And so it's interesting that there's this view of at least a loose connection between false prophecy and gain, gain of some sort. And I think you do see that with false teachers as we move into the New Testament as well. But false teachers really do sort of occupy a little a slightly different space. They they seem to occupy this space where they are distorting doctrine and leading people astray, even even those who are part of the community of faith being led astray. And it's simply because I think the shortest way to explain it is they're just not situating their teaching under the final authority for life and faith, which is the word of God. Right. And sometimes they're so close to it that they like we talked about before we started recording today, when you're so close to something and you're constantly saying the same thing, you can start to drink your own Kool-Aid, I think. And I think human nature as a whole, we always tend to, you know, want to go the least path of resistance. So I think that's where prosperity gospel and some of these things come from. It's a comfort, you know, people want something that's comfortable. And if you read the Old Testament, if you read a lot of the scripture, it's going to make you uncomfortable because he has a standard. He has things that he set out and set for us to live. And the Bible, the scripture is for us to guide our life. And, you know, it's not always easy. He doesn't say that picking up your cross daily is going to be a walk in the park. It's going to be challenging. You're going to face tribulations. You're going to be uncomfortable. And at a core level, I think human beings just don't want to be uncomfortable. Yeah. I mean, let's let's parse out uncomfortable a little bit. Let's expand that because I think, you know, uncomfortable can mean just I don't want to do what God is telling me to do. Right. Because maybe I disagree with it or maybe I just don't feel like listening to somebody right now or what have you. Right. I don't want to conform my behavior to that authority. But I think uncomfortable can also mean this doesn't seem like it's going to work at all. This seems like a losing strategy, Lord. Like you're walking me into, you know, you're you know, I always go back to the walls of Jericho. Right. There had to be some of those Israelites who are walking around that wall going, what are we doing? Right. Like this can't be right. Somebody call me more times and we're going to have to start at this. Right. And now we're going to blow horns. What is happening? Right. Like there has to be that, you know, just sort of everyday Israelite who's standing there going, this is lunacy because it's such an odd request. It's not a military strategy, really. It's a theological strategy. Right. And God is going to bring the deliverance. And so that requires a great deal of trust because in any way that you thought about that from a human perspective, walking around a city seven times and blowing horns is not going to accomplish what you'd like to accomplish. Right. Right. It kind of gets we talked a little bit about the episode about this, but there's a guy named John Keeks who wrote The Nature of Philosophy. And in The Nature of Philosophy, he distinguishes between goals and ideals. And I think what we could sort of say, and I think it's actually a really helpful distinction, but what we could say is that in that narrative, let's say defeating Jericho, capturing Jericho, right, seizing that city was the goal. Doing it faithfully, so faithfulness is the ideal. And so what we have is this goal and faithfulness constrains the way that goal can actually be achieved. So these ideals act as sort of constraints or governors, and they tell us, okay, well as you're pursuing this goal, if your ideal is faithfulness, now there's only certain ways you can actually go about pursuing this goal. They do governors, a good word, right? They keep us in check. They pull us in. Our ideals sort of keep us from pursuing what we would like to pursue in ways that would rub against our ideals. Right. You know, sort of like, yeah, you won, but you cheated. And so, you know, in what way is that a win? All of us have these little rubs in our mind, right? This is, I think, part of where we get our conscience from, is that when we rub against these ideals, when we do something against those ideals, even if we accomplish a goal, we don't feel quite the same way about accomplishing that goal. And so I think that's a really helpful distinction when we think about false teachers, because what may be happening with false teachers is that their set of ideals is being subsumed underneath their goals. And so now these ideals are no longer controlling, constraining, or governing how they go about achieving their goals. Now their goals are driving everything that they do. They've almost given themselves over to a baser instinct. Mm-hmm. Yeah, totally. When you're saying that, I'm thinking about a level, like when you're trying to make a, say, you're building a deck, and if you, you know, you're setting the foundation, and it's off, but you're like, oh, it's only off a little bit. It's not going to be that big a deal. By the time you get to the other side and the end of it, you're going to be like, holy cow, that's like a slant. Right. But it's just this little tiny bit. So I think it's important, like our compass. I always, I have a compass actually in the middle of my chest tattooed, and I think I always kind of bring that back in my mind. Like my center, my compass, my moral right doing in front of God needs to always be in check, because if it gets off even slightly, I don't want that to flow into all

Like our soul, everything that the Bible says, you know, guard your heart with all diligence, because, you know, out of it springs all the issues of life. I think everything starts at our moral compass, at our heart, like at a soul level. And if you let that slightly get off, even, you know, incrementally over a period of time, and you start drinking your own Kool-Aid or start like, oh, justifying and thinking it's okay, and people are receptive to it, because again, that's our nature. We want to be comfortable. We want to go against what makes us uncomfortable. And I think it's important to keep that in check and to do a check-in every so often. Can I read real quick the definition of discernment? Absolutely. It says, it's just real simple. It says the ability to judge well. And, you know, a lot of times people will always want to quote, well, we're not supposed to judge. That's God's job, but there are places in our life that I think it warrants it. In John 7, 2, it says, rightful judging, stating, do not judge according to the appearance, but judge with righteous judgment. This means to evaluate a person's actions and character based on what's true, not just surface level observations. It emphasizes the need for discernment and fairness rather than superficial condemnation. And I think that's so critical as believers, as we're on our daily walk to check in first with ourselves, but also know that it's not completely wrong all the time to judge. Like if you're taking somebody at their word and like putting it, applying it to your life, it's important that you know that that's run through Scripture and that it's actually biblically sound, that it's theologically sound. One, I think that relates to some of the decision-making and insight development research that I've read, because part of what you find in that literature is when you're looking back on something that's happened, let's say you're looking for a historical analogy, right? Let's say we know we've had heresy in the church before. We know we've had false teaching in the church before. And so you sort of look back and you say to yourself, well, how was it handled back then? That's helpful to a degree, right? Because we have these sort of repetitive patterns that we tend to see exhibit over and over and over again. But because there are repetitive patterns, what we're really doing is living into the same dynamic that we had in the past with certain differences. And so one of the questions that we might want to start thinking through as we discern is, what didn't we do last time? What wasn't in place last time? What's lacking in this environment that we could do now that might actually help us guard against this better? Now, on some level, I don't think we're ever going to stop false teaching, right? But I do think that we can do a better job of helping people understand, okay, here's what false teaching looks like. And I would say I want to make a distinction because I do think, you know, speaking in public, maybe I have a vested interest in making this distinction, but I want to make a distinction between false teaching and false teachers. Yeah. I think everybody can make mistakes. False teaching can be just as simple as that. I made a mistake, right? And so everybody makes mistakes. Like we don't want to burn anyone at the stake for that. We don't want to jettison them from the church for heresy for making a mistake. Mistakes happen. Right. I would argue that false teachers are those that refuse to admit those mistakes and continue pushing a particular perspective over and over and over and over and over again through time. Yep. And eventually. There's no correction. There's no impetus for change. Sure. Totally. Yeah, I totally agree. And so I think there can be a range of false teaching ranging from my bad. I misspoke, you know, sort of the lowest level kind of mistake you can possibly make up to a point where you're developing something. You've left some, you know, some aspect of scripture out or you've intentionally ignored it or whatever. And you're now creating a false system, a false claim that doesn't align with the reality that is God. And I think that's sort of the, that's the spectrum of false teaching. And then you also have false teachers that I think are doing more of the latter. They're doing more of the stuff at the end of that spectrum there. They're developing these claims that are demonstrably false that they then push regardless of any sort of corrective that scripture might give them or the community of faith might give them. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed with inflation, market volatility and ongoing global uncertainty? More families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Yep, totally. I also think, though, because it's easy to think in terms of true and false, right? That's a pretty simple, you know, I make an assertion and we can say either that's true or false, right? You know, Nate is wearing a green shirt today. That's demonstrably true or false, right? I can be right or wrong about that. Right. But there are other ways, I think, to be false. And this gets back to that sort of distinction between goals and ideals, right? If we think about your example of a trued deck, right, it's level, right? It's trued to something else. It's trued to a reference point. In that case, the ground, right? So the deck is actually level and you could walk on it without, you know, getting an incline treadmill kind of workout. Right. It's nice and straight. It's trued. And it's trued to a standard, right? We can think of false teachers in that same way. Our job, if we think about what it means to be true, not to tell the truth, but to be true. That's a different concept than telling the truth. Right. It's not that they're completely separate, but when we are true, not to ourselves, not to, you know, whatever, but when we're true, we're aligned to God. That's what we're seeking to do. We're trying to true ourselves, just like you level up a deck. We're trying to level ourselves up to God and use him as our standard, his word as our standard to say, does my life align here? Right. How does this work? And so I think there's a way for false teachers to substitute the standard, right? So it's no longer God's word that is the, you know, that we're trying to true ourselves to. It's some other story. It's some other interest. It's some other agenda. And as long as I can show that I'm pursuing that agenda, now I'm true to it. And that may appear really compelling in certain instances, but I think in an awful lot of cases, what we find is that it isn't. Once you sort of dig through some of the layers of it, it's actually a false narrative. So I use the example in the piece that I wrote of a gentleman who was on the panel with me at a political event. And he talked, he used, he cited the passage in second Corinthians where it talks about where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And he used it in the context of American freedom. Now everybody listening may think, James, that's kind of nitpicky. That's not that big of a deal. Right. And I would say, probably, like, that's fair. Right. But as an example, just think about what's happening there. A scripture is being used out of context. It's being insinuated that it says something different than it actually says. Or that it's for just one group of people. Or that it's for one group of people. So it's being pulled out and used to justify a political narrative. I don't even want to comment on whether I think that political narrative is good or bad. It doesn't really matter. Right. The dynamic of taking a scripture and using it to justify.

What have we done? We've made the Scriptures subject to an ideology out here. This ideology is now running things, and the Scripture is serving that ideology. Right. When, if we're really honest with ourselves, what we want is the reverse of that. We want the Scriptures to be determining, you know, the limits of these ideologies. We want the Scripture to be determining the limits of our goals. Right. And so, as a means of false teaching, that sort of use of Scripture, I would say, is a false teaching, although I wouldn't go so far as to say the gentleman that was on the panel with me was a false teacher. Right. I think it's just a comfort thing. Imagine when we get to heaven, do you think there'll be a section of just Americans, and it's like the upper echelon of, like, God didn't write, he didn't inspire the Scripture for all these people for someday for us to just use it as, like, for the American narrative. Like, he died for all. He came for all, and he wants to have relationship with all, not just Americans. So it's pretty egotistical for us to do that. And I've seen that beyond just what happened, and I was actually there. I've seen it beyond that. I think people misuse that all the time because it's so comfortable. And it's like you're just focusing on themselves. It's bigger than that. It's always bigger than that. And I think there's emotion tied to all this, James. I think people base their lives, their decisions, their daily walk, sometimes off of emotion instead of truth. And I've had to really work on that in my life just because of my upbringing or what have you. Like, I have to really not listen to what I'm feeling and go back to the truth. And the truth doesn't change. The Scripture does not change. Since I've become a believer, 727-98, I've never seen the Scripture change. It's always consistent. It's always steady. And we can always do that, just like the point of your reference for your deck. You know, you want to align to the thing that is truly plumb, that's truly true, truly flush, and that's what we're supposed to align our life with, no matter how we feel. Yeah. Well, and you think, you know, it's 2 Timothy, and I was trying to find the reference here. I can't find the exact reference right. 2 Timothy 4.3 finally found it. When people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. That suit their own passions has to do with the emotions. These are the things that we desire. We want these things. And so there's a whole sort of, again, a philosophical literature that talks about this and how our wants sort of pile up. And one want drives another want. One passion drives us toward another passion. And so this gets to that point of, we've talked about before, rightly ordered loves. You know, when we're thinking through, we are to love God with all we are and all we have. There's nothing left over to give to anything else. What you end up doing is you end up loving neighbor, loving nation, loving, you know, X, Y, Z, right? Whatever it is that we are supposed to love within the flow and stream of our love for God. But it's not as if we segment ourselves. We don't disintegrate ourselves in order to love other things so that our love for nation is sort of separate from our love for God. It's not the way it works. What we see in Christianity is we see that our passions, our love, our loyalty, our allegiance is always to God. And that as these other things come into our path, they can be incorporated into that love for God. They can become almost like unique expressions of that love for God. Right. And a recognition that these are good things that God has given us and, you know, all those kind of ideas. But with false teaching, what we tend to have is we tend to have a reorientation, a shift in our attention away from a full and complete love of God and toward a full and complete love of something else, even if a love for God and God's people is justifying it. I think we have, I think we see this happen an awful lot when we talk about justice. Oh, yeah. Right. So should justice be done? Yes. Will justice be done? Occasionally. I mean, I think just a realistic reading of Scripture. Yes, justice will be done on occasion, and it will be a shadow of what we're going to see, the sort of justice that Christ is going to bring when he comes back. Right. Right. And so we, there's not, this is not an excuse not to pursue justice at all. But again, if we go back to sort of this ideal versus goal thing, what we might say is, we might say, well, we need to do justice in this particular situation. This is a goal. Let's do justice. Mm-hmm. Okay, but how we do justice then is going to be constrained by our desire to imitate Christ. It's going to be constrained by our desire to be faithful to the Scriptures. It's going to be constrained by, you know, our own humility and our ability to understand even what justice is at this point. Right. Like it's going to have all these different constraints to it. And so we, we can't just assume that there's one way to pursue justice and if I just keep hammering at it, as long as bad people are being punished and good people are being vindicated, I must be doing it right. Mm-hmm. There's something that's a little too pragmatic about that for my taste. Totally. And I think it goes back to, you know, God's called us to die to our flesh every single day. And he says, you know, he must increase. I must decrease. Sorry to come back to the deck analogy, but one more time, when you start leveling it up at the beginning of the project, you're not finished. You don't, you don't not check at the rest of the way. You check it as you go because the little tiny slip and you're off. And by the end, it's going to be off by a lot. And so I think it's important. That's why he calls us to, you know, die to ourself, die to our flesh every single day. Yeah. And I think if we're, if we're thinking through, you know, if you're, if you're sitting out there listening to this and you're saying, well, how do you really avoid false teachers? I think number one, you know, we have to develop a doctrinal framework for ourselves that will guide our discernment as we're listening to other people teach. And so I think we've, to a large extent lost that today. There are some denominations that continue to do catechesis. They, they walk through like the Westminster reform catechism or the Lutherans do Martin Luther small catechism. And what that catechism was intended to do was to say, look, everybody should be reading their Bible. Everybody should be reading their Bible devotionally. Greg Quiggle and I recently talked about this in our episode about the reformation. And I think he's got some fantastic insights. I'll, I'll link it in the show notes as well. But everybody should be reading their Bible and everybody should be reading their Bible devotionally. But there is something called the teaching office that is intended to equip the saints for the building up of the body of Christ. And so where would we locate that teaching office today? Well, it's tempting to say, will you locate it with the pastor, right? You locate it with people with teaching gifts. Yes and no. I mean, I, I think they, they could occupy it to a certain degree, but that's very different than, you know, the teaching office is going to have sort of a, a structure to it. A different level of discernment that goes in and says, these are the balls and strikes that we need to call when we're teaching people how to live for Christ in today's world. And the democratization of, of Bible reading and Bible interpretation, the ability for anyone to start a church, whether they have a, whether they sit beneath a teaching office or whether they are just gifted teachers, has, I think, become a real problem within modern day, at least American Christianity. We, you know, we both know people, um, we've talked about the, uh, the lady who is head of the faith office on the show. Um, I can't remember her name right now, Paula White. It seems to me from what I've seen that she is, um, sitting well outside the bounds of doctrinal Christianity, right? Um, but we could say the same thing about other popular pastors and preachers who seem to be just going it on their own. Um, I, I've got a series of articles coming out on masculinity and I think we talked a little bit about our last episode on masculinity, Rob Driscoll. Um, give the teacher that no doubt he knows how to teach well, but he's often beyond the pale. He's not being careful. And, and so you have an awful lot to critique there. And again, it's not that he's made one mistake. It seems to me that there's a pattern of evidence that this gentleman is just not careful again. I'm not, I'm

I'm going to step over a line and say he's a false teacher. I'm saying I don't think he's sufficiently careful. Right. And you could see that in a lot of different people at this point. And so, we just have to be careful that in this day and age, we're not trying to build an audience, right? And that as we, I would say if people wanna avoid false teachers is where I started this little rant, find a catechism and walk through it. Right. Right. Learn the basic doctrines of the faith. Understand the limits. Right? And then ask good questions. Don't fall for people who are telling you, you can go beyond those limits. Yeah, totally. I mean, I think we have to sort of develop that structure for ourselves. There's really good resources. I think Tim Keller even came out with a new catechism not too, too long ago. I believe it was the New City Catechism, if I'm remembering it correctly. Westminster Catechism is fantastic. You know, Luther Small Catechism is what I actually came up on. I was Lutheran when I grew up. And so I had some sense of this is the structure. This is the doctrine. These are the things that I know. These are the constraints, right? These are the boundary markers. I think in 2025 especially, James, not everybody pursues education in Scripture like you and I have. If I went to Bible school, you certainly studied more than most people I know. You know, you have, I forget, is it a doctorate in Old Testament? Yeah, a PhD in theology. Yeah. Old Testament. Old Testament. So not everybody does that. And if you look at just the normal lay Christian, they're getting some on Sunday, but if they're choosing, a lot of Christians aren't really digging in and getting a podcast or listening to teaching. They're not doing a discipleship with anybody. They're not going through, like you said, reading the Bible devotionally. And so there's a shortage there, I think. The average person doesn't, so it's even more critical that you run through the filter of like, is this biblically sound? I've been going to my church for three years, and one thing I absolutely love that I've not ever been on a Sunday one time where my pastor didn't say at the beginning of his message, God, it's an honor to speak and orate on your behalf. If I say anything that is wrong or false, let it fall on deaf ears, just like the Scripture says. And that's how he sets the base every single Sunday. And he's done that for five or six years, however old the church is. And I don't think, I've been to other churches where for years I've never heard that once. And if you look at somebody like Mark Driscoll, is he constantly pointing people to him or without him realizing it, pointing to his interpretation or what he's trying to convey to his audience, to his listeners? And I think that's where people can get tripped up, especially if they don't have the foundation like you and I have, seeking out education and understanding Scripture, understanding. And dude, I did that and I still don't always fully understand and grasp everything I'm supposed to. So how much more is a baby Christian going to struggle with this? So I think discernment is so critical and so important, especially right now when we're constantly being bombarded on social media. You can't go anywhere throughout the day online without getting somebody's opinion on something. And I don't listen to people's opinion or man. It's good to reference that sometimes, but I want to always run things through Scripture and what God has to say about it. He should be the final authority. Well, I mean, if we look at this teaching in 2 Timothy 4.2, we understand the problem we're in right now in a, I think, a more acute way. You know, if you think about the, I mean, the picture I always go back to just because I think people may be familiar with it is the Little House on the Prairie. You know, at least people our age will be familiar with Little House on the Prairie, right? I know what that show is, but yes, I do. Yeah. But I mean, if you think about it, you know, where is Charles Ingalls and his family going to go to church? The one church that's close enough for them to go. Right. That they don't have to travel two days to get there. Right. I mean, that guy can pretty much say anything he wants from the pulpit. It doesn't matter whether he's, you know, challenging people with God's word or whatever. He doesn't have to create an affinity with his audience necessarily. Now he does, like the preacher is good, but you get my point. He doesn't have to butter these people up. They're there. Yep. And they're not going anywhere else. Right. Right. But I think now what we have is we have this sort of challenge of I can actually scratch the itching ears of people to develop an audience. And to the extent that I can do that, if I can find my quote unquote market niche, right, and really, really hone in and understand my target market and get people to come in and listen to this, right? That is, I think, more prevalent today than it could have been in a situation even when like we were growing up. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Right. Right. I mean, we had, you know, multiple churches in our town. My parents were Lutheran. I went to the Lutheran church. You didn't have a lot of competition between churches. It wasn't like they were out, you know, hey, come to the Baptist church, so the Lutheran church, you guys, like, you know, you kind of had the audience you had and you were trying to shepherd that flock the way you could shepherd it. And so I don't wanna say that there were never any problems with that. I'm just suggesting that as we've moved into this digital age where folks like me can have a podcast, right? There is always the temptation of how do you grow an audience? How do you get bigger? Oh, totally. And normally that's not gonna happen. Like if you just think about, well, how could I challenge people today in a way that would make them really uncomfortable with God's word? Right? Normally you're trying to think through just that dynamic of what's my target market? What do they wanna hear? How do they wanna hear it? And some guys just sort of specialize in that. They do a really fantastic job of it and they can build huge audiences. Right. Not to say that everybody with a huge audience does do that, but I'm saying there are some people we've got to learn to distinguish, like who's really doing this because they want to speak and teach and help people think in a Christian manner and who's doing it for their own gain. Yeah. And God doesn't need us. He doesn't have to use us. He chooses to use us. But I think we get involved too much. Do you remember, I think it's been a couple of years now, but when that men's conference happened since you mentioned Mark Driscoll and that men's conference happened and the guy came out with the sword and like the muscles and like doing the strength work and Mark made a big stink and said, you know, it's a Jezebel spirit and like kind of shut down the conference. The next day it was all over the place. What happened the day right after that? He had a brand new book that was coming out called The Jezebel Spirit. And we're called to be in the world but not of it. It is totally manipulation and using world tactics to try to go viral to make more money to sell your book, you know, to, and I would be so ticked off if I was there at that conference and that happened. And then the next day on my way home, I found out that there's a book called that. It's like, this is a setup. That's a total scam. That's something you'd see in the world, not somebody that, you know, is proclaiming Christ. So that. And I did hear about that. I mean, if you think about whether he did that with an authentic desire to correct a bad behavior or not, this is what I mean. The pattern of evidence suggests it leaves the door open that he was actually doing it for his own purposes. Right. And I think that's part of the challenge with this new media sort of circus that we live in, right? Is in order to get more views, you do have to do that sort of self-promotion. But in doing that sort of self-promotion, again, to go back to this distinction between goals and ideals, if we wanna grow our channel and if we wanna grow the podcast, if we want to get bigger and make more money on it or whatever, we're probably doing it the wrong way. But there's something that we also have to think through. It's like, it's

Yeah. As soon as those ideals are pushed out of the way, as long as they're not constraining us anymore, now we run the risk of doing something that could be a noble goal, right? It might be helping people, might be appropriate in many, many times. But because we're not doing it out of a sense of faithfulness, because we're not doing it with integrity, because we're using certain tactics, now it becomes untrue in the sense that we've been using true. Like, it becomes unleveled, right? It's now a shaky deck. And so I think, yeah, with that whole situation, I'd sit back and just say, you know, this seems so consistent with some of the things that I've seen him do before. That it's hard to believe that he really thought, like, this was something that needed to be addressed at that men's conference at that moment. Right, 100%. And I can say with all conviction that we don't ever set out to try to go viral. We don't ever think, hey, this topic, this is gonna make our numbers spike, this is gonna get new audience, new views, all that kind of stuff. We literally go off of what we feel like is needed and what God, you know, I know you pray about it, I pray about it. I'm like, God, show us what we wanna do because we wanna align with him, not our own goals. And if he chooses to do that, because again, he doesn't need us. And it's not our job to make things work. It's not our job to even reach people. That's God's job. We just have to be good stewards of what we have, our platform, and making sure that 100% of the time it is aligned with him and not our own desires. But you know, again, at the end of the day, we're human, both of us. And so sometimes we can get off even slightly, like I said earlier. And that's why it's important, I think, daily to check in and make sure that you're up with him and not our own goals, not our own agendas, not our own wants, desires, any of that. You know what's interesting? And maybe we can close with this, but as I think about what we do on the podcast, there are certain days where I have guests booked and I am sitting at my computer doing something else, and I'm sitting there like watching the numbers on the clock go up toward the appointment where I have to turn on the Zoom and record with somebody. And just thinking to myself, I have no way, shape, or form want to have a conversation with this person. I don't think it's gonna be fun. I don't think it's gonna go well. Right? And this is part of my personality. Like I am sort of an Eeyore by nature. Right? So like I just sometimes I have to overcome that idea of I don't think this is gonna go well. And I would say the most fun I have on the podcast is when I'm in the middle of a conversation with somebody that I didn't think was gonna go very well and it's just awesome. And it's in those moments where I'm like, okay, I have no bead on any of this, really. Like if it were up to me, I'd be, I wouldn't have had this conversation. Right. But it's so rich and so good and so helpful. You know, you've had folks on the podcast that I've loved having conversations with. Darren is one of my favorite guests. Right? Jason was awesome. You know, like we've had a, well, we had Big Daddy Weave on just a few minutes ago. I mean, these are people I don't really know. Right. Dan Bremness. And you know, these are all Christian music artists that you're familiar with, but I don't really know. And so I'm walking into those conversations having no context for what we're gonna talk about. And those have been some really fascinating conversations. Each one of them has been awesome. And so I sit back and I do it even with authors, right? Like, you know, I'll read a book and I'll be like, yeah, that's, but I've kind of learned to be like, to set that aside and go, let's see what happens. I've only ever had one person that I recorded the show and then had to tell him after I was done recording that wasn't gonna air. After almost three years doing this. Yeah. And how many hundreds of episodes? That's, that's pretty good. It's only happened once. Yeah. And so I, I think it's just overall, like, I think there's a sense in which, as we approach this show and as we think about it in terms of, you know, false teaching and avoiding some of the trappings of really appealing to people's itching ears. Um, I think it's important sometimes, I think it's important sometimes for me when I look at it and I say, yeah, I don't think this is gonna be a good conversation. Like I'm just so surprised sometimes. You're like, so bothered. Right. And then, yeah, exactly. And the surprise is actually really good for me. Right. Because it means that I'm not trying to manipulate things. I'm just sort of going with the flow and trusting other people to send me good folks and uh to interview and trusting you and, you know, you know, pulling in some people that I'd love to talk to, but, but still, there's just a lot of these that I don't know what's going to hit. I don't know what's gonna be good. I, you know, somebody will come on screen and I'll be like, oh man, you know, put all the preconceived notions aside and just have a good conversation. And almost, it's almost always worked out. Yeah, totally. And I think that's good for our listeners to hear too because we are all human and we all have those thoughts, you know, with, with every part of our life. And it's, and that's part of submitting to Christ. Like, hey, I'm gonna put my best foot forward here and, you know, you can take something small that I feel like is not very good and, and turn it into something great. Um, he does that all the time. He does it through Scripture. He's done it in both of our lives. We've all, like a person here and bring up many accounts of that happening. Uh, we sometimes limit God, I think in our own minds. And we think, ugh, you know, again, because emotions, are we operating? I think this is important for our listeners. Like, are we operating in our feelings and our emotions or in what we know is true? And we know that God can take our minimal and turn it into something better he does on a daily basis. And we don't want to put him in a box in that way. So. Well, I'll just say, you know, when we get back, when we close this out, we're thinking about false teaching. I'll go back to this Bonhoeffer quote. I'm sure I've said on the podcast before, but it's one of my favorites. He's teaching at an ecumenical conference in Gland. And he gets up and he's speaking to the audience and he says, isn't it clear, gentlemen, that we are more enamored with our own thoughts than we are with the word of God? We need to be reading the Bible not for ourselves, but against ourselves. Well. And I love that idea. I think I'm butchering the quote a little bit, but it's a fantastic concept that when we're, when, when our affinity for a particular teaching, when our ears itch, right, to use the words of second Timothy, when we have these itching years, what we're really doing is we're trying to find something that will justify whatever it is that we want to do. That's reading the Bible for ourselves. Right. I think this and, oh, look, God happens to agree with me. I must be right. And what Bonhoeffer says is, no, we should, that may happen. I don't think you would deny that that would happen. Right. That sometimes we get it right. But what he's really trying to say is, look, the Bible is intended to be transformative for us. None of us have been fully conformed to the image of Christ. And so if we're reading this book and never feeling like we're being challenged to change, we are reading it wrong. And if we think that everything that comes out of our mouths is helpful to the body of Christ and it's, you know, it's building up in the way that we would think it should, but we're not reading the Bible against ourselves, we may actually be the people who are teaching those who's just have itching ears and all we're really doing is scratching, not teaching. And so I just, I love that quote. And I would say to folks out there, you know, if you're reading the word of God, it's supposed to be challenging. It's supposed to push us. And it's not pushing us because we're horrible human beings. It's pushing us because God loves us so much that he wants us to, he wants to open up possibilities that only obeying him can provide. And so that discipline of obedience is really crucial. We've talked about that on the show a number of times, but when we, when we're looking at false teaching, that would be my encouragement is if you feel at some point when you're listening to a message and you're just, you know, somehow this message connects to your anger or your sense of injustice or your whatever, just take a step back and think about what you may be missing. Right. So that you don't end up just being carried away by someone who's really good at understanding why you're mad, what's unfair, you know, who's the bad guy and who's the good guy. Yeah. Um, ultimately, all of this has to come under the final authority of God's word. A hundred percent. One last thing, uh,

we think, oh, no, I'm good. Like, I'm a Christian. I, you know, I changed my life. Like I went from here to here when that happened, but that is a daily thing. And it doesn't say renewed. It says renewing, which means every day. So just wanted to throw that out there. I think it's important for us always to have those check-ins and make sure that each day we're dying to self. He must increase. I must decrease. That's a good way to end a man. Really appreciate it. This has been a great conversation. I really enjoy it, Nate. And hey, everybody, avoid false teaching. Check in with God's word daily. Be discerning. Find a good doctrinal structure that you're sitting under. And if you don't, if you can't find one, you know, don't look at our website. Go to your church. Ask your pastor. They're there to help you. So, but it's really crucial to avoid false teaching. Paul's warnings to Timothy in 2 Timothy, particularly, I think, are things to read through. 2 Timothy 4 would be a good place if you're just kind of thinking about false teaching. I'd direct you there. But we really need to get a handle on this as a church. And we really need to get ourselves back together, sitting underneath the authority of God's word with a teaching office that's wise and understanding and can help us understand what is in and what's out as opposed to just listening to everybody who happens to be an effective communicator and may be leading us astray. So thanks, everybody, for hanging in and listening. Thanks, Nate, for being here. And we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian Podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Finding uplifting news in today's headlines is often like searching for a needle in a haystack. At The Story Behind Podcast, we believe in the power of finding heartwarming tales and are happy to share empowering stories with you every week. Hear about how Steve Harvey surprised a dying man on Family Feud with $25,000. Get inspired by the note a waitress received from a patron dining alone. And even hear about how one VIP passenger made a hardworking pilot get emotional before his flight. To start listening to The Story Behind Podcast, visit lifeaudio.com or search Story Behind on your favorite podcast platform.