Rocky Road Devotions: Blown Away by Every New Wind of Teaching

Monday, April 18, 2022

Now these are the gifts Christ gave to the church: the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, and the pastors and teachers. Their responsibility is to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ. This will continue until we all come to such unity in our faith and knowledge of God’s Son that we will be mature in the Lord, measuring up to the full and complete standard of Christ. Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church. He makes the whole body fit together perfectly. As each part does its own special work, it helps the other parts grow, so that the whole body is healthy and growing and full of love. Ephesians 4:11-16

In the 1950’s our family did camping for vacation. We were novices back then. The first attempt at this was by trial and error. Mom and Dad slept in the station wagon, while brother Thom and I set up a small tent. We had no one to tell us, nor did we have the sense of foresight to imagine, that you must dig a trench around the outside perimeter of a tent, if you don’t want the result of a sudden downpour to include me, in my air mattress, floating halfway down the trail in southern Pennsylvania. That night became the imprinted image on my mind’s eye of what it would be like to spend the first night of eternity in Hell.

That image was created when I was a child. I’m a lot older (and a little wiser) now. The image of Hell’s first night is scarier! That image still involves a tent. As Chris Ritter recently wrote in an article, my new first night in Hell involves a kind of Methodism John and Charles Wesley wouldn’t claim, or even recognize:

Some types of Methodism have embraced more of the original characteristics than others. But American Mainline practice tends contrary to them all. Conversion gives way to self actualization. Manifestations of the Spirit give way to respectable religious practice. The drive toward primitive orthodoxy gives way to a wide, sagging theological tent.[1]

In a recent meeting on the campus of Duke University, in the very chapel where I spent 6 years attending divinity classes and worship events, the winds of new teaching made the Methodist-related school’s tent sag a little further to the left, as the main topic was the legitimizing of worshipping a god who is queer[2].

For You Today

In a related article[3] another Master of Divinity student at that March 23^rd meeting, proclaimed: You are never called to abandon yourself…, which is a good bit different from what the Christ actually did say:

“If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross, and follow me. Matthew 16:24

For a divinity major to say something quite opposite of the words of Jesus, it might be a wise choice to keep the day-job, and forget about proclaiming new winds of teaching in this sagging Methodist tent. He just might find himself floating away on his immature children’s air mattress when the storm comes.

For those who are at the helm of the sagging tent, read the words of James, the brother of our LORD, who wrote a stern warning about steering the ship:

Dear brothers and sisters, not many of you should become teachers in the church, for we who teach will be judged more strictly. James 3:1.