I have a friend who has a tendency to label people as ‘false teachers’ when she disagrees with something they say.

I worry about her when I hear her doing that, for two reasons:

1 – She is dismissing not just the specific issue being presented by the person at the immediate moment, but everything they say and believe.

2 – Why are you looking to people to be your teachers, rather than the Messiah and the Holy Spirit?

The Holy Spirit reveals knowledge and understanding to any and all believers who are honestly seeking truth.  To each one is given in his own time, at his own pace.  We don’t all receive the same things in the same order.  But that’s part of the beauty of the Father’s method.  Each of us is an individual stone of the temple built without hands. We each have a different piece of the puzzle.  We need to look to each other in order to bring all of our pieces together . . . to get the whole picture.  Just as we are all members of the same body.  The analogy is the same, scripture tells us that we are the temple, our body is His temple.

We are all parts of the whole.  We are each given our own piece or pieces of truth, our own parts of the puzzle.  We have to come together and join them to get the whole picture.  And in that process, the parts that don’t fit will become evident and be set aside.  Scripture is the screen that we must shake them through to sift out the wrong ideas to be cast aside.

The fact that someone has written a book or has a YouTube channel with thousands of followers doesn’t mean that everything they say or believe is true.  NOBODY has everything right.

Some people have been diligently seeking on the right path for a long time, and they may have acquired many more puzzle pieces than someone who has only been on that path for a short time. When you are new to that path, and have only recently found it, it’s good to come across one of those who has already acquired many pieces of the puzzle.  That can be very helpful.  But don’t make the mistake of accepting everything they say without question.  Be like the Bereans.  Go to the scriptures to see if the new nugget they’ve offered you is correct.  Some of them may still have some indoctrination of men which they have not yet recognized as such, and cast off.

Some years ago there was one such gentleman whose work I discovered.  He had written an amazing book, which was clearly something that the Father had given him to share with the world.  And yet, he still believed in the pre-tribulation rapture, which to many of us is so very fundamental.  It was like he had the graduate degree without first getting through kindergarten!  But after years of keeping tabs on his work, one day I saw that he made a rather cryptic post about believing something your whole life, that can be found nowhere in scripture.  I immediately knew in my gut that he was in the process of figuring out the fallacy of the pre-trib rapture.  Sure enough, within a week or two he came out and publicly said as much.

Would my friend have labeled him a ‘false teacher’ and discarded his important, god given body of work because he had not yet figured out one of the basics?