rookie wrote:
Sister Jeannette,We all begin as babes in Christ. As a spiritual babe we still hold onto false notions of who God is and what His Kingdom is, and what this world is.
[b]True! I've met one or two folk who belonged to a cult yet did seem to have had a genuine experience of God.
When I first knew the Lord I had doubts about the virgin birth of christ and the person-hood of the Holy Spirit. If someone persuasive enough from a cult had come along, I might easily have been led astray.
This had obviously happened to a girl I met who was in the Moonies. She described an obviously genuine experience of new birth, but the local church she tried was apparently completely dead, and the cult seemed so attractive as a result.[/b]
1 Corinthians 4:14-15
"I do not write these things to shame you, but as my beloved children, I warn you.
For though you might have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet you do not have many fathers; for in Christ Jesus I have begotten you through the gospel."
The Corinthian church received all the Spiritual blessings that are found in Christ. There were many who taught, yet few had grown beyond spiritual babes. With this condition in place, many false preconceived notions still exist in the believer's carnal mind. This is where the false doctrines finds its sustenance. The effect of these doctrine for the most part allow the "self" to remain intact.
Then there are those who are of Satan who spread the seed that grows into weed. They willing know that they teach a lie, because God has witnessed to them as such. They enter the sheep pen by another means, with their only goal as hirelings, to glorify themselves.
[b]Such teachers probably suppress the warnings of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, and come to believe their own lies. I got involved with someone like that for a (mercifully short)time, after being a Christian for some years, and should have known better. He was trying to start his own cult but imagined that he really did have a special revelation from the Lord, that only the special few were, as yet aware of. This seduction was very powerful to me because of the desperate longing to feel accepted and be one of the "in crowd" (another manifestation of "self" of course!)[/b]
[b]...Maybe that is another way we can be vulnerable to deception. For many years I so lacked confidence that I was unable to trust my own "anointing" (His sure voice in our heart - 1John 2:27, that you referred to). I constantly looked to others - especially respected Christian leaders - for reassurance.
Thankfully, most of them were basically "sound", and the different, usually slight, errors in their teaching tended to cancel each other out.
Although it really used to upset me when those leaders I loved and trusted disagreed with each other!!!
That is probably another help in keeping from error - listen to a range of teachers - and then "eat the meat and leave the bones" as a friend used to say
Thank you too, Jeff, for some wise counsel
In Him
Jeannette[/b]
