Matthew 7.15-23
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
Back in September, on the holy day when the Russian Orthodox Church commemorates the birth of the Theotokos, the God-bearer, Patriarch Kirill proclaimed not the Son of Mother Mary but the Fatherland. The patriarch's comments during his sermon came amid nationwide protests over the Kremlin's announcement of a partial mobilization to replenish Russian forces fighting in Ukraine as well as rising anger over the nearly one hundred thousand lives lost in Russia’s feckless invasion.
Labeled “Putin’s altar boy” by Pope Francis, Patriarch Kirill has been an enthusiastic pulpiteer and propagandist for the Kremlin. In his September sermon, the patriarch equated retreating from Ukraine with retreating from faith, and even as he exhorted his hearers not to view the Ukrainian people as enemies— indeed he implored them to forgive their Ukrainian brothers and sisters— he once again blessed the war as a holy war and insisted that Russian soldiers who killed Ukrainian civilians were doing a heroic deed.
The shepherd of the Russian Orthodox Church went even further in his sermon:
“If someone, driven by a sense of duty, the need to fulfill an oath, remains true to his calling and dies in the line of military duty, then he undoubtedly commits an act that is tantamount to a sacrifice. He sacrifices himself for others. And therefore we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”
Notice—
It’s so subtle it’s easy to miss what the preacher did there.
He claimed that it was the solider’s sacrifice of himself for Russia that washes away all his sins.
In the name of Jesus, the patriarch preached that a sacrifice other than the sacrifice of Christ, blood other than the blood of Jesus, a death offered at the altar of the nation rather than for the whole world, can absolve us of our sin.
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits.”
Last week the Guardian featured an expose on the ReAwaken America tour as it completed its seventeenth and final rally in Branson, Missouri where over three thousand people packed into an overflowing auditorium for what the journalist describes as part Stop the Steal rally, part charismatic religious service, part QAnon and anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory all rolled into one.
The ReAwaken America tour is the creation of Clay Clark, a former wedding reception DJ from Oklahoma turned podcaster who came to prominence protesting Covid lockdowns.
Clark launched the ReAwaken America tour with General Michael Flynn in the spring of 2020.
During the Branson rally, the three thousand attendees raised their hands in the air and closed their eyes as a preacher from South Africa, narrating the voice of God, declared:
“Hear me today, for I have found a man after my own heart and he is among you. I have the whole thing planned out. I have looked for a man who would restore the fortunes of Zion.”
After a day of hearing from the former national security advisor and the My Pillow guy and Sherri Tenpenny, who claims Covid vaccines have killed twenty million people, the ReAwaken American tour culminated with hundreds of attendees lining up by a swimming pool for a full-body immersion baptism.
“I feel more confident now,” Joanna Grassia said as she emerged dripping from the ice-cold water. “My eyes have been opened.”
Just two years ago Joanna Grassia had been a member of a church in Philadelphia. But at the ReAwaken America tour she was baptized in the name of a different trinity.
Literally: “In the name of the Lord, the spiritual, and the political.”
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves…Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,” will enter the kingdom of heaven…”
In other words—
False teachings lead to false saviors, which is a big problem because false saviors cannot save, and all of us— even the best of us— require saving.
False teachings lead to false saviors and false saviors cannot save.
False teaching is not a new problem.
In the Book of Acts, Paul warns the believers in Ephesus:
“Some even from your own group will come distorting the truth in order to entice the disciples to follow them. Therefore…I commend you to God and to the message of grace, a message that is able to build you up and to give you the inheritance.”
False teaching may be more ubiquitous today thanks to cable television and Twitter, but false teaching is not new. However, it would be a dangerous error to think that false teaching is always so easy to identify as a Q-flavored baptismal formula or a priest’s promise that war can wash away sins. False teaching comes dressed in sheep’s clothing, Jesus says; that is, false teaching has the patina of orthodoxy. It sounds Gospel-ish.
Craig Parton is an attorney who serves as the United States Director of the International Academy of Human Rights based in Strasbourg, France. In his book, The Defense Never Rests: A Lawyer’s Quest for the Gospel, Parton describes his often frustrating and exhausting journey from unexamined atheism to faith in the Gospel that gives us Christ. Soon after converting to Christianity, Parton says he was dismayed to discover that so many Christian preachers and teachers were actually amiable wolves in sheep’s clothing and that much of modern American Christianity is really a treadmill of personal self-improvement, striving to fulfill laws and rules, or a roller-coaster ride chasing one spiritual high to the next, always seeking but never fully satisfied.
Parton writes:
“I experienced what happens when the Law and the Gospel are not understood and thus not distinguished. My Christian life, which truly had begun by grace, was now being “perfected” on the treadmill of the Law. My pastors told me to yield more, to pray more, to give more, to care about unbelievers more, to read the Bible more, to get involved with the church more, to love my wife more, to love my kids more.
Not until some 20 years later, did I understand that my Christian life had come to center [not on Christ but upon me] on my life, my obedience, my yielding, my Bible verse memorization, my prayers, my zeal, my witnessing, and my sermon application.
Allegedly, I had advanced beyond the need to hear the Gospel preached to me anymore. Of course, we all knew that Jesus had died for our sins, and none of us would ever argue that we were trying to “merit” salvation. But something had changed. God was a Father all right, but a painfully demanding one.
I was supposed to show that I had cleaned up my life and was at least grateful for all the gifts that had been bestowed. The Gospel was critical to me at the beginning, critical now to share with others, and still critical to get me into heaven, but it was of little other value. The “good” in the good news had gone missing.”
According to Jesus, the test of true teaching is not how the teachers seem but how you seem after you’ve given your all to their teaching. For Parton, the fruit ultimately born in his life by these so called gospel messages was exhaustion and weariness. To Do List Christianity and Self-Improvement Spirituality burnt him out.
It left him hating himself for the ways he fell short and the times he relapsed, and it made him critical and self-righteous towards others whose discipleship did not measure up to his own. As a result, he was less content and more unkind than he had been before he became a Christian.
False teachings are like short beds and narrow blankets.
They might look like the real deal, but they’re not enough to give you rest.
Just before, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned that the door that is him is narrow to enter and hard to find. Now, at the end of his sermon, we discover that Jesus thinks the reason people like you will miss the gate, the reason people like you won’t go through the door, the reason people like you will fall off the path, to the left or to the right, is because of people like me. Jesus says the reason people like you will fail to enter through the narrow gate is because of people like me.
“Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord,”will enter the kingdom of heaven…On that day many will say to me, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?” Then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; go away from me, you lawless ones.”
Go away from me— he’s talking to people like me.
For Jesus, the question is not “Shall all be saved?”
For Jesus, the question is “Will any preachers be saved?”
You can know the false prophets that Jesus has in mind have been teaching a false gospel because when they stand before the judgment seat they don’t say, “Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me, a sinner.” No, they cite their own works, “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?”These preachers are false preachers because they’re banking on the deeds they did to get them right with God so, presumably, this is what they were teaching as well. But not a one of us will stand before the Judge banking on anyone’s works but Christ’s alone.
Apart from Christ, even our best deeds are mortal sins.
In typical fashion, Martin Luther summarized this passage with a blistering wisecrack:
“Hell is paved with preachers, and no one is deeper in hell than preachers.”
Luther sounds hyperbolic, but it’s an assertion consistent with the New Testament.
Whenever Jesus or Paul use warning phrases like “severed from Christ,” “fallen from grace," “shipwrecked your faith,” “accursed,” and “thrown in to the fire,” such language is always reserved for those who add to the Gospel of grace; therefore, such language is always reserved for preachers and teachers of the Gospel.
No matter what you read on the dark reaches of the internet, the greatest danger facing Christians is not persecution but false preachers.
This I know because the Bible tells me so.
The greatest danger facing Christians is never persecution but always false preachers because you are justified before God only through faith and faith, scripture insists, comes by hearing. Which is to say, faith comes by means of a preacher, whether that preacher is someone who stands in a pulpit or someone who sits in a pew. The greatest danger facing Christians is never persecution but always false preachers because your justification as a sinner before a holy God depends upon your hearing and trusting not any message but a particular promise.
And no one can self-apply this particular promise of the Gospel.
You can’t look yourself in the mirror and declare the forgiveness of your sins. You can’t self-apply such an unbelievable promise. You know yourself too well. You need a preacher.
In a sermon on this text in 1935, Dietrich Bonhoeffer preached that
“God one day [on judgment day] will ask us solely about the everlasting gospel: Did you trust and believe the gospel? God won’t ask whether we were Germans or Jews, whether we were Nazis or not, not even whether we belonged to the Confessing Church or not. God will only ask if we believed the everlasting Gospel.”
Bonhoeffer preached that sermon at the underground seminary he had established at Finkenwalde in 1933 after the German Church officially endorsed Nazism.
The seminary existed exactly to resist the false prophets of a new nationalistic Christianity, yet Bonhoeffer did not let his resistance lure him into becoming a false prophet of his own by adding the work of resistance to the Gospel of grace.
God’s never going to ask you if you were a Republican or a Democrat, progressive or conservative, black or white, rural or urban, woke or MAGA. One day, on the last day, God’s only going to ask whether you put your trust in the everlasting Gospel.
Which means two things—
You need a shepherd in sheep’s clothing; you need a preacher.
And you need to be able to discern whether or not that preacher has handed over the goods to you or instead given you an altogether different gospel that, scripture says, is no gospel at all.
I’ve got a thick, hardcover Index to all fourteen volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics. The Index is intended as an Aid for Preachers, and it’s one of the books I consult on a weekly basis for sermon preparation. Because I go the Index every week before I come to you with a word, I stuck a letter in it that I received from a congregant several years ago.
She had not attended worship for several weeks so I sent her a note one Monday morning to check in with her and to say that she was missed.
Her reply taught me an important lesson I hope never to forget.
“Dear Jason,
Thank you for your kind note. You’re right. I’ve not been to church in over a month. There is no reason for my absence other than to say that I simply could not do it anymore. I felt like, for my own good, I had to stay away.
Some background might be helpful:
After my son graduated from high school, we discovered he’d been abused for years by someone close to our family. It tore us apart. My son lashed out with anger and alcohol. I blamed myself for not knowing, not seeing it, not being able to stop it. I nursed my own guilt with alcohol and pills. With a lot of help, he’s healing slowly and putting his life back together. When he was a boy, he was so happy. Icould easily have shot the man when I first found out. That’s not all.
My daughter married her high school sweetheart, whom, she did not discover until too late, was an alcoholic. He was a respectable-looking accountant who first just slapped her around a bit. When he finally really hit her, she left with our grandson but only after he’d spent all. the money she’d saved.
Here’s why I have stayed away from church. I know that, as a Christian, I should forgive those men. I know I should forgive myself too. I know that I should at least be working towards forgiving them. But I can’t. And, believe me, it’s not because I haven’t tried hard.”
And she underlined hard three times.
Maybe it’s not fair to you, but it feels like every time I came to church I wasn’t being told what God has done for me in Jesus.
I was told instead what I needed to do for God, to do what I already can’t find the strength to do; namely, forgive them. Church just somehow became another place in my life where I felt like a failure, and you, though you seem like a nice person, you became another man in my life who was devouring the parts of me that remain.”
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.”
She ended the note with a postscript:
“I’ll be back and give it another try. But a word of advice, since you’re a new preacher: I don’t need to be reminded every Sunday of what I ought to do as a Christian. Believe me, knowing what we should do is not the problem for any of us. Every day, though, I need a reminder that God has met me in my failures— God has met me in my failure to forgive— and God forgives me.
That’s the Gospel, and it seems to me I have a right to expect you to give it to me each and every week.”
She was right.
When it comes to preaching, the Gospel is Law.
Christ’s warning to you at the end of his sermon— it’s also a kind of authorization for you to demand a certain sort of sermon.
That you are to avoid false preaching presupposes that you have the right to expect true preaching.
You have the right to demand that I hand over the goods.
You have the right to insist that I place the pearl of great price in your earballs just as surely as we will place it in your hands when you come up to the table. You have the right to expect to receive from me not my ideas, not my opinions, not my politics, not my wisdom, not my spiritual experiences, not my personal struggles, and not my theological questions.
Christ’s warning to you is also his authorization for you.
You have the right to demand that I hand over to you the only thing you will ever need before the judgment seat of the Lord, the everlasting Gospel. You have the right to hear that week in and week out, Sunday after Sunday, in as many ways as the Holy Spirit can help us convey it to you.
Never forget because preachers seems to forget all the time.
The Gospel isn’t just news. The Gospel is good.
If what you hear from up here, doesn’t sound like good news, watch out.
“Beware.”
In this place, the Gospel is our Law.
This semester I’ve been co-teaching a course on preaching at Duke Divinity School with Will Willimon. After class one day a United Methodist pastor from Tennessee confided to me.
“I really try to stick it to my people,” he said to me, “exhort them to live out their faith, put some skin in the game, and stand up to the injustice in the world.”
“And?” I said, wondering where he was going.
“Last Sunday after worship this fellow comes up to me, mad as hell, and he gripes at me, “Look preacher, I work three jobs to put food on the table. I’ve got more problems in my own family than I know what to do with, and I’m just barely staying on the wagon. Some Sundays it feels like I had to crawl across broken glass just to make it to church. All I want is a word of comfort.” I didn’t know how to respond to him.”
And he looked at me for an answer.
“You know— and trust me, I’ve learned this lesson the hard way— his is not an unreasonable request.”
Just in case I haven’t yet made it clear, let me hand over the goods.
After all, Jesus warns that I’m going to meet with a bad end if I don’t give you the goods.
So hear the good news:
Despite of your track record and mine, if you but believe in Christ and him crucified, if you only trust that Christ died for your sins and was raised for your justification, you will be saved.
We live by grace or we do not live at all.
False teachings lead to false saviors and false saviors cannot save. But the real one can. And he has. He has washed you in the waters of baptism. He has declared you righteous. He has opened the Kingdom to you and forgiven you of all your sins. And, in the event you have a hard time believing this particular promise today, Christ comes to give himself to you all over again, in word and wine and bread.
So come to the table.
No one will enter the Kingdom because they said, “Lord, Lord…”
All of us may enter because the Lord says, “This is my body broken for you.”
The Road to Hell is Paved with Preachers