======================================================================== DO I WASTE TOO MUCH TIME STUDYING FALSE TEACHERS？ by Tim Conway ======================================================================== Summary: This sermon emphasizes the importance of being innocent concerning evil while focusing on maturing in righteousness and God's truth. It discourages excessive preoccupation with false religions, false teachers, and evil practices, urging believers to prioritize understanding and living out the truth. The message highlights the need to discern wisely what to engage with and to focus on handling genuine truth to recognize and combat falsehood effectively. Duration: 14:37 Topics: "Discernment", "Maturity in Righteousness" Scripture References: 1 Corinthians 14:20, Romans 16:19, Ephesians 5:12, Romans 14:4, Acts 5:38, 2 Timothy 2:23, 1 Timothy 6:3 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ DESCRIPTION ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This sermon emphasizes the importance of being innocent concerning evil while focusing on maturing in righteousness and God's truth. It discourages excessive preoccupation with false religions, false teachers, and evil practices, urging believers to prioritize understanding and living out the truth. The message highlights the need to discern wisely what to engage with and to focus on handling genuine truth to recognize and combat falsehood effectively. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ CONTENT ------------------------------------------------------------------------ What are your thoughts on the so-called Baal worship performance that took place at the Commonwealth Games? And I want you to biblically try to discern this, try to answer this. I don't know what that is. I'm just going to give you some verses. 1 Corinthians 14 20. Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature. It's that little four words there, be infants in evil. What is it? What do you think that means? What does it mean to be an infant in evil? Just very little. Yeah, very little. Don't give yourself to maturing. Don't give yourself to that. And you can kind of see, go to Romans 16 19. Romans 16 19 says, Your obedience is known to all so that I rejoice over you. But I want you to be wise as to what is good and innocent as to what is evil. Now, be innocent as to what is evil. You know, in Psalm 16, you get this idea that you don't even have the name of the false gods on your lips. David said that. I'm not even going to take their names on my lips. Ephesians 5 12. It is shameful even to speak to the things that they do in secret. Anyways, you just you kind of get a feeling in all those things that, you know, there's all sorts of things that I don't need to spend my life, for instance, studying all about false religions. I don't need to spend all my time studying Islam, studying Catholicism, studying Mormonism, studying the Jehovah's Witnesses. Now, you know what? As much as my evangelism might be helped by understanding what some people believe, it can be helpful. But I think that there's, I didn't go there and, you know, there's all sorts of things that people do and that that take place. I mean, what are your thoughts on so-called Baal worship performance that took place at the Commonwealth Games? Well, I would say it sounds evil to me. It sounds like false. It sounds like idolatry. It sounds like just pagan things dredged up again. Quite honestly, I don't know that we need to even take up our time with it. Conrad Murrell writing in one of his Gateposts, somebody asked about, like, what do we do about the big name false teachers? And he said, you don't do anything. What do you have to do with them? This is not to say that their ministries are all counterfeit or useless. We are not required to say either unless we know. Jesus said in John 21, what is that to you? You follow me. Paul rejoices in the preaching of Christ, even though many were doing it from wrong motives. Who are we to judge another man's servant? We are not responsible to analyze everything that comes along, only that which has to do with our own personal ministry. If I am faced with the decision of working with these men or supporting or endorsing a particular thing they are doing, then I must find the mind of God in the matter, but then only in relation to what God wants me to do. Let them alone. You have enough to do without embittering yourself fighting against flesh and blood. It will only swell you with pride over your own self-righteousness. Get on with your own personal work and refuse to be distracted by cat calls, taunts and questions from the sidelines. These men's apparent success means nothing. God is keeping the records. The laurels or censors of men do not influence him, and there will be many surprises at the judgment seat. A man's results may be great or it may be zero, but it makes not one whit of difference about your responsibility to God. In all likelihood, if you follow God, your ministry will never cross the path of the man in question. Gamaliel wisely suggests that time will either vindicate or condemn all men. What do you have to do with them? I mean, what do you have... Quite honestly, what do you have to do with T.D. Jakes? What do you have to do with Joel Osteen? I mean, the truth is they're living their life. It's not like they're seeking counsel from you. It's not like they're asking you how to interpret a certain passage. You don't have anything to do with them. He just wrote this. Why take up your time with them? Why do you need to do that? And, you know, there are some of these guys on the internet. It's like all they like to do is take their time. And, you know, I mean, some of them may hold to good doctrine. They may be Christians, but they kind of make it their lifetime ministry to expose and debunk. Listen, we know these guys are bad. I don't believe what Joel Osteen believes. I don't believe what Copeland believes. And I just don't really need to concern my life with these guys. Quite honestly, you don't need to sit there and study them. I mean, sometimes, you know, some of that stuff can, I guess, be entertaining. But I agree with Conrad Murrell. What do you have to do with them? It's like you've got your own life to live, and you're not going to their church. You're not being deceived by them. You just, you know, why do you need to do anything about them? And I would say the same thing about this. I mean, yes, sometimes we're curious and we wonder, oh, no, you know, what are they doing over here? And how, to what degree is society decaying? And, you know, I don't have any problem with us keeping our eyes open to that, actually recognizing what's happening in the world of abortion and what's happening in the world of transgender. And, you know, how are things decaying in the public school systems? And we kind of keep our eyes open to things, and we know how to pray accordingly. But I'm not saying it's necessarily sin to go check out what happened at the Commonwealth Games with regards to bail worship. That's not my point. But my point is, what does it really have to do with us? And I just think that there's a lot of things like that where it doesn't have anything to do with us. We don't really need to go there. I mean, could you take all this time, you know, studying? Like, I'll tell you another place. I think when people study too much about false religion, when people study too much about demons, when people study too much about the devil, too much about witchcraft, too much about the occult, too much about these things, there's just no reason to go there. Why do you need to do that? I mean, fill your life with all, it can become a very strange curiosity a lot of times. And I would just say, be innocent when it comes to regards, be thoroughly mature when it has to do with righteousness, when it has to do with God's word. But, you know, people that spend enormous amount of times studying like all the false prophets, all the false teachers, all the false everything, it's just like, you know, you could be spending all that time in the word. And why give yourself to being so knowledgeable about what's false? Rather, there's no end to what's false. What we need to be is we need to be mature when it comes to what the truth is. And so that would be my quick take on that. But there can be a strange curiosity that creeps up in you and you want to... You know, the illustration of the dollar bill, because working at the bank, you're working with legitimate money all day long, just all day. You're handling it, you're looking at it. I mean, you know, the smell, you know, the feel, you know, the exact material, how it rubs up against your skin as you're, you know, filing through it or something, you're counting it. And there were times where somebody wouldn't even be looking at it, but they handled legitimate money for so long that they would feel a bill in a stack as they were just going through it. And immediately they knew this is wrong. And so it wasn't that they had the fake bill and they stared at the fake bill all day. It was that they were handling real money all day long. Yeah, and I've heard that when certain government entities want to train people to decipher counterfeit money, they don't show them counterfeit money all day. They show them the true thing all day. And that's where we should be. How are we going to spot the counterfeit? Not by studying all the counterfeits. The way you're going to know the counterfeit is by knowing what the true dollar looks like. So, yes, I was saying for evangelistic purposes, like if I recognize that there is a certain amount of knowledge that I ought to have about Islam, especially now, when I was in the US, my opportunities to have really good conversations with Muslims was almost non-existent. Since I've been over here, it happens all the time. And so does that mean that I need to sit down and memorize the Quran? No. The fact is most guys I talk to don't even know what the Quran says. So if I was going to be in a place where for any reason I needed to try to debate some Muslim scholars, but even there, I have to weigh out now, is that profitable? What am I really gaining? Why am I going to do this? But I think we all have to ask, yes, if I've got Catholic family members, should I sit down and listen to John MacArthur teach on some of his... He's done some good ones on Mary or on the Mass or on the Pope or on the scandal of priesthood. I mean, those can be very profitable, especially so many people in MacArthur's church have been saved out of Catholicism. And if you've got a church where a bunch of people have come out of that, then equipping the people to reach all their family members can be... Yeah, I would say we need to weigh it out based on evangelism. But if you've got like a mother, you've got aunts and uncles or whatever in your family, and they're still in those circles, and you having some kind of working knowledge... If I had a mom who was watching Joel Osteen all the time, then there may be a place to equip myself to try to help my mom. Yeah, because I was recently like... Because I've not obviously ever listened to him previously, but I was thinking, well, I don't actually know what's wrong about John Hagee. Like, I don't actually know much, but that's one that I was listening to regularly, but I've never really heard much or heard anyone say anything. Yeah, and we crossed paths in San Antonio, and he was right there. And so he was on the radio all the time, and you're going through the Christian stations, and there he'd be. And if you listened to him for 15, 20 minutes, the guy was actually a phenomenal speaker. And oftentimes, his messages sounded very much full of truth. But the very fact that he could have guys like Benny Hinn in, it just said something about who and what he was at the deepest level. I mean, Jesse Duplantis, these... I mean, you have Duplantis, you have Benny Hinn. These guys are just... They're bad through and through. But if we're talking about protecting people, there can be a place, as much as it has to do with evangelism or protecting, yeah, there can be a place to make ourselves knowledgeable if it has to do with good. And it's not just this curiosity. You know, sometimes we can just waste a lot of time because we're curious about things, and we spend all this time kind of informing ourself about what is evil when it doesn't really bear a lot of fruit in our lives. And I would just say, be innocent with regards to evil. I think your understanding of evil becomes... It becomes actually good if it's for good purposes. I mean, if a pastor's having to deal with some kind of error in the church or some kind of influence from somebody that's happening in the church, I mean, it can be wise to actually figure out what's infecting the group of people that the Spirit has made me an overseer over. But I mean, I think we need to be wise as we think through what we're really going to give ourselves to. ======================================================================== Video: https://sermonindex2.b-cdn.net/TUUdP7N_1Fo.mp4 Source: https://sermonindex.net/speakers/tim-conway/do-i-waste-too-much-time-studying-false-teachers/ ========================================================================