Is your leader taking you down the wrong path?
Some today preach that God wants all Christians to have financial prosperity on earth, while others call that heresy. Who is right? How do you know?
In his book Abusing Scripture, Manfred Brauch tells of many horrible things that have been done in the name of Christianity through the years. He contends, “At the core of these broken realities with Christian faith and life there lies a fundamental problem, which I identify as ‘the abuse of Scripture.’ It consists of interpreting and applying biblical texts in ways that distort their meaning and message, thereby undermining the veracity and vitality of Christian witness and presence in the world, and thus contributing to the distorted reality of abuse within it.” He goes on to describe several ways in which people can distort Scripture and the ramifications of those mistakes.
I strongly recommend Dr. Brauch’s book for those with the terrifying task of daring to try to teach God’s truth to others. To be fair, though, it is a rather academic book that the casual church attender isn’t likely to read. So how are you to know if the person teaching you is misleading you?
In Acts 17 we see that the believers in Berea are praised because they didn’t take Paul and Silas’ word for what God was saying. Rather, they searched the Scriptures daily to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. Do you think your spiritual leader is more qualified, more learned, more wise than the apostle Paul who wrote huge chunks of the New Testament? I submit that there is no spiritual leader alive today whose teaching should be respected more highly. And yet the people he was leading are praised for studying the Bible diligently to make sure what Paul was saying matched Scripture.
There is no substitute for every believer being in the Bible for himself and herself. Only by knowing the vast sweep of Scripture can we properly understand individual verses. Otherwise it’s far too easy to take separate verses like “Judas went and hanged himself” and “Go and do likewise” and think they go together…
