6 Ways to Weed Out Wolves

The greatest threat to the church is not the blowing winds of culture from the outside, but false teachers who infiltrate from the inside. Those who look like sheep but are wolves. Those posing as shepherds but are charlatans. These false teachers will most certainly be conduits of cultural ideologies, while at the same time, spewing licentious lies and exploiting people with their greed.

I Know, You Don’t Want to Talk About False Teachers.

Talking about spiritual threats in the church can be uncomfortable for some people. I was recently in a conversation with another pastor who remarked, “I would much rather focus on good things and the Good News than strike fear in the hearts of our churchgoers with ‘doom and gloom’ remarks about false teachers.” While I understand the sentiment, Scripture is our authority, not peddling to consumers or mitigating reality — even with the best of intentions. We don’t pick from the menu of pastoral options and decide, “I’ll take the easy parts of church-life for my main course, with a side of ‘no controversy.’” No one who is enlisted as an under-shepherd of Christ gets to pick and choose their job duties like they’re walking a buffet spread. We are servants of Christ, not ourselves! Yes, we all want to major in the good things and the Good News. Yet, more often than we’d hope, we will find ourselves muttering Jude’s words as he agonized, “Beloved, while I was giving all diligence to write unto you of our common salvation, I was constrained to write unto you exhorting you to contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3).

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