QUESTIONER: “Why should I believe anything that you write or say, or believe anyone else for that matter? There are so many people giving their opinions these days that my head is spinning. How am I supposed to know which one is correct?”

Here is my response to the above questions:

Those are excellent questions which will probably also speak for many others today. So thank you for asking so that I am given the opportunity and privilege to (hopefully) provide an answer. It is very understandable that you should ask them, given the plethora of ‘teachers’ thrown up by the explosive proliferation of the internet in the last couple of decades.

The first thing that I would say in response is that there is no compulsion for you to believe anything that I write or say. I am not a cult! You are free to receive or reject it all with no bad feelings on my part. However, if you have been put off my teaching because of the lies and innuendoes of others — which will always afflict those who are forced to be controversial through having to oppose the massive escalation of false teaching — then I will be saddened. However, having said that, whenever anything comes into your field of view which claims to be truth, you are obliged to ask a number of questions to see if it is so. For it would be a mistake to reject truth out of hand simply because of scepticism or because you have been ‘fleeced’ by a false teacher in the past (as is the case with many).

The primary purpose of humans in this life — why we have been created, in fact — is to seek out and discover truth, objective truth, so that it can do its work in us (John 8:31-32; 16:13; 17:17-19; 2 Corinthians 13:8; James 1:18). That is what truth does. It works in us. It is dynamic (like dynamite). Truth is a mighty force which — if properly pursued — ultimately leads us right to the terrifyingly beautiful feet of God, who actually incarnated as truth personified (John 14:6). That is really why so many are afraid of truth: They inwardly suspect that it has the potential to turn them upside down and inside out and shred every last vestige of inauthenticity and mendacity from our grubby little hearts. The reality is that most people would far rather be fed comforting lies than receive inconvenient or uncomfortable truth. This is the world in which we live. This is why (as I wrote recently) so many want to be hooked on ‘Hopium’, the drug of false hope, rather than face up to what looks like it could cause despair but it is simply truth in all its stark nakedness. Truth will always be discomfiting to those who wilfully resist it, but energizing for those who willingly receive it; and truth is always an exquisite but hideous (and constant) elephant in the room in a fallen world in which corruption is more prevalent than cleanliness.

Rejecting truth or accepting falsehood are both moral and spiritual crimes of equal proportion. Therefore, you have a duty to test whether what is being said or written really could be the truth. So you must begin by asking the following questions:

  • Does the person writing or saying these things have my best interests at heart?
  • Is the person who is writing or saying these things into anything dodgy? (Check it out!).
  • Is this person merely trying to build a huge audience rather than floating his teaching on the wind and leaving it to God to give the increase (if any)?
  • Is this person a serious student and researcher of original material (e.g., consulting primary sources rather than merely gathering information off tendentious secondary sources on the internet)?
  • Is this person obedient to what the Scriptures clearly teach about the qualifications for becoming a teacher in the church? (For example, no woman or novice [neonate] should be setting themselves up as authoritative teachers in the Ekklesia).
  • Does this person take elements or verses out of context in order to bolster the alleged veracity of his teaching?
  • Does this person have a consistent record over time for being truthful and faithful?
  • Are the people who follow this person’s teaching unquestioning, gullible pawns and obvious ‘pushovers’, or are they ardent truth-seekers who take nothing lying down but ask all the right questions?
  • Does this person encourage his followers to question his teachings on their own and search the Scriptures for themselves to see if they are truthful?
  • Have I objectively checked everything that this person is saying against the whole essence of holy Scripture (rather than just a few choice verses)?
  • Does the Spirit in me witness to my spirit with a lovely leap of the heart that I am hearing or reading truth, or is there a kind of uneasy ‘check’ in my spirit about what I am reading or hearing?

Having asked such questions (and there could be many more), if you are the ‘real deal’ (i.e., a genuine disciple of Christ), you will earnestly pray something like this: “Dear Lord, I do not want what merely makes me feel better. I want the truth and nothing but the truth, even if it makes me feel worse”. Genuine disciples of Christ will not settle for anything less. Those who are not genuine disciples of Christ merely want to have their current proclivities and biases confirmed. They will reject anything which does not leave them in the driving seat (for they cannot face relinquishing their obsessive, faithless need to be in control). They will merrily believe that human freewill is the dominant dynamic in human salvation rather than submitting to the fact that the mighty sovereignty of God will always be the dominant dynamic because that could only be the case with unregenerated humans who are spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1; Colossians 2:13), spiritually blind (John 3:3), and are actually in themselves darkness (Ephesians 5:8). If you come across anyone teaching that freewill nonsense (when John plainly stated that one cannot become a child of God through their own will, John 1:13), just drop them like the plague and keep away. They are not to be trusted and I would doubt that they are saved because anyone who is genuinely saved knows very well that it was God taking the initiative.

Those who are not disciples of Christ will literally take delight in proclaiming that genuine disciples of Christ can lose their salvation, in blatant contradiction to the words of Christ who said that “no one can snatch them out of My hand” (John 10:28-30). Those who are not disciples of Christ will, because of their woeful and wilful failure to understand the above fundamentals of the faith, run around trying to overthrow the assurance of genuine disciples of Christ by insisting that they have demons indwelling them — which is both a denial of their redemption and deliverance in Christ and what must surely be a blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Those who are not disciples of Christ seem to enjoy standing on their heads essential principles of the faith. They simply revel in ‘upside-downness’. What does that tell you about them? Go on… say it!

Those who are not disciples of Christ will always base their notions of truth on their subjective experiences rather than on the objective word of God. Those who are not disciples of Christ will first seek out those experiences and then set out to find Scriptures which only appear to back up their case (which is known as eisegesis), rather than actually backing it up. The ‘happy-clappy lubbly-bubbly feel-good factor’ and the confirmation of their prejudices provide the thrust for these false disciples’ spiritual pathway rather than the denial of self which is demanded by Jesus (Matthew 16:24) and the acceptance of the complete (and usually painful) stripping away of all their dross (an example of which occurs in Mark 10:17-22). For “afflicted is the way that leads to life and there are few who find it” (Matthew 7:14). That is the literal meaning of the Greek there. In this world, disciples of Christ “will have affliction”, but they can take it because they know that Jesus has “overcome the world” (John 16:33), even though it has not been visibly ratified yet. This is why the various wayward bandwagons and sects which claim to be Christian are so stuffed full of adherents. They desperately want to avoid such Divinely-appointed affliction. Most of those who claim to be “Christian” do not want truth-at-any-cost because it may mean that they have to stand utterly alone. Instead, they just want the security of a social grouping and to feel the validation of being ‘loved’ within that group and by the fair-weather ‘god’ which they have faithlessly concocted in their minds. This is what the experience of “church” is like for so many, serving merely as a cultish palliative to their alienation and anomie.

Some of you who are reading these words will be filled with outrage, whereas others will be fervently nodding their heads. Either you get this or you do not. That is the difference between the false disciple of Christ and the genuine. The false disciple of Christ will believe and follow those who tell them what they want to hear, no matter how outlandish it is or how contrary it is to the whole essence of Scripture. The genuine disciple of Christ will have an instinct for truth and will always seek out those teachers who proclaim it. This is what was meant by Jesus when He said, “My sheep will hear My voice” (John 10:3-5, 27-28). They know Him and they follow only Him, and thus they will only involve themselves with teachers who also follow only Him. They will have a built-in instinct to do so. From time to time they may take a wrong turn and temporarily get involved in some nonsense, but if they are the real deal that will only have happened as part of their spiritual education and chastening by the Lord, to fit them up for increased wisdom and faithfulness and they will soon be out of that quagmire and on their way back on the right path. (By the way, all this is beautifully illustrated in John Bunyan’s gem-of-a-book and masterpiece, “The Pilgrim’s Progress”, published in 1678, which I urge you all to read, if you have not already done so. You can read it in a PDF at this link here: https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/bunyan/The%20Pilgrim’s%20Progress%20-%20John%20Bunyan.pdf ).

So now you have the answer to your questions. If you genuinely, from the bottom of your heart, seek only truth — the whole truth and nothing but the truth, no matter how ‘bad’ the fruits of that honest search may make you feel — then you will find it and you will receive it (Matthew 7:7; cf. James 1:5). But if you only seek to have your prejudices confirmed and to find feel-good false comfort, then you will increasingly be drawn into a maze of your own making and you will wallow ever-deeper in delusion and lies.

Now you have something approaching litmus tests concerning whether or not you should believe someone and how you can know which teachers are moving in a right direction (for they have their secret struggles too!). An honest, searching soul will always find truth. I hope that you are one of these and that the above words answer your questions and that they will bring some consolation on your spiritual pathway through the wilderness of this world.

Blessings from me to you… 💝

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© Copyright, Alan Morrison, 2023
[The copyright on my works is merely to protect them from any wanton plagiarism which could result in undesirable changes (as has actually happened!). Readers are free to reproduce my work, so long as it is in the same format and with the exact same content and its origin is acknowledged]

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