False Prophets Within

Kongsvinger Lutheran Church

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Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern

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Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

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And now, here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew, the seventh chapter.

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Jesus said, Beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.

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You'll recognize them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles?

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So every healthy tree bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

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A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and is thrown into the fire.

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Thus, you will recognize them by their fruits. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my

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Father who is in 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 mighty works in your name?

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And then I will declare to them, I never knew you. Depart from me, you workers of lawlessness. This is the

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Gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. Amen. All right, there's a couple of days in my life

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I will never forget. One of them is the day the space shuttle blew up, all right? I was a senior in high school, and when the space shuttle blew up,

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I was in the library at our school studying for a final exam, and somebody came in and said, the space shuttle just blew up.

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And we thought he was joking, but it turned out that wasn't a joke, it legitimately happened.

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The other one is 9 -11. I remember very, very vividly watching, being glued to the television, waking up in the morning and looking at my news feed on my computer and seeing, seeing that one of the towers had been struck.

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And then turning the news on, watching as the news was covering the

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Twin Tower incident. At that point, it had only been one tower that had been struck. And then very, very vividly,

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I remember watching the video feed as the second plane hit the second tower.

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And the first words out of my mouth were, we're at war. You cannot see violence like that, and that attack of that kind, and not think that you're at war, because you are.

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But I would note, we Christians, we oftentimes forget that we are at war.

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The devil is waging war against the saints. We read in the book of Revelation in chapter 13 that the devil conjures up two beasts to wage war with the saints.

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That's their purpose. First beast is a political beast. The second one is a religious one. It says,

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I saw another beast rising out of the earth. This is Revelation chapter 13, verse 11.

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It had two horns like a lamb, but it spoke like a dragon. It exercises all the authority of the first beast in its presence, makes the earth and all of its inhabitants worship the first beast whose mortal wound was healed.

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So think of it this way. One of the big mega weapons that Satan has employed on the battlefield in order to wage war against Christ, and against the saints, against the church, and against the gospel is false prophets.

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That's how this goes. And the day in which we live, it is politically incorrect to speak about Christianity as being the one true religion.

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You talk like that, and people are going to accuse you of being closed -minded, of being bigoted, of being hate -filled, of being arrogant.

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How do you know? Do you think you're better than everybody else?

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This is how they talk, right? But I would remind you all that the category of true prophet, false prophet, true teacher and faithful teacher of God's word, and false teacher, these are taught by us, by God, in his words.

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Christ himself says in our gospel text, beware of false prophets. They come to you in sheep's clothing.

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Inwardly, they are ravenous wolves. You'll note the apostle Paul, in his farewell address to the pastors of the church in Ephesus, he said to them, pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock in which the

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Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.

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I know that after my departure, fierce wolves will come in among you, not sparing the flock, and from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things to draw away the disciples after themselves.

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And that's what false teachers and false prophets do. They draw away disciples after themselves.

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They teach unique doctrines that are unique to them. They teach heresies.

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They speak words in the name of God that God hasn't given them to speak. And Christ says you're going to recognize them by their fruits.

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And sadly, in our day and age, too many people within the visible church hear these words of Christ, you will recognize them by their fruits, and somehow think that this merely has to do with how they conduct their lives.

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As long as they haven't been caught up in a major sex scandal or haven't been caught embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from their congregation, then they must be bearing good fruit.

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But where the place they're supposed to be looking is what they're preaching and what they're teaching.

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And I would note that in the Old Testament, in the prophet Isaiah chapter 57, it specifically talks about our worship and our praise and the way in which we talk about God as being the fruit of our lips.

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So no pastor gets a pass. I don't get a pass because the enemy works from within, within the visible church.

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You'll note that Christ says that false prophets, they come in his name and they're wearing sheep's clothing in order to deceive.

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They don't come dressed in a red union suit with a red pitchfork and horns. That's not how they come to us.

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They come to us instead dressed just like us, sounding like us to a point.

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But you'll note that even in the book of Revelation, it talks about the lamb who has the voice of a dragon.

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Pay attention. It's the dragon's voice that you're listening to to distinguish between a true prophet or a false prophet.

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Christ asks, are grapes gathered from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? No. So every healthy tree then bears good fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

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And I can say this without any exception. And I mean this. Every single person that I have covered in my time doing

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Fighting for the Faith, which is almost 15 years now, every person claiming to be a prophet, claiming to hear the voice of God, every single one of them without exception is incapable of rightly handling

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God's word. And it's easy to spot them because they constantly twist it all up.

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And yet they claim, thus saith the Lord, the Lord told me this thing or the Lord told me that thing or the

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Lord has revealed to me that we are in a season of breakthroughs and that you should expect a

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Kairos blessing to hit your bank account. And you get the idea, right?

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Not a single person who claims to be a prophet have I found that when you apply the fruit test, listen to their teaching, that any of them passes.

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They all only bear bad fruit and teach false doctrine.

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So every healthy tree bears good fruit, the diseased tree bears bad fruit. Healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor a diseased tree bear good fruit.

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And every tree that does not bear good fruit, it is cut down and thrown into the fire and thus you will recognize them by their fruits.

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And Christ here talking about them being thrown into the fire, these false prophets, their fate is hell. Make no make no exceptions here.

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This is absolutely the case. These false prophets, they will not be with the saints in glory in the world to come.

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They will be with the dragon in the pit of hell for all of eternity, for their blasphemies, for their idolatries, for their deceptions, for their despising of God's word.

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In fact, Christ says, not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my father who is in heaven.

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And this is where we should pay attention to Jeremiah. Let me give you a little bit of the background here.

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It's always good to get a little bit of the context. Jeremiah is speaking about false prophets, speaking to them, but the words that he's been given here, he didn't concoct them himself.

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They didn't arise within his own heart. These were words given to him by God directly.

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Jeremiah practically took these words down via dictation. That's what we know about the prophet

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Jeremiah. And the big context here is that several kings, or two kings before he became a prophet, there was a king by the name of Manasseh, and this guy waged a campaign, a war, against biblical

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Judaism, absolutely waged war against it. And one of the things that he did is that he is the one who took over the worship in the

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Temple of Solomon itself, and he set up in the Temple of Solomon images to false gods like Asherah and Baal, and people engaged in the worship of Molech and the starry host of heaven, and all of the pagan

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Gnostic deities of Egypt. They were all brought in to the temple there, and to make matters even worse, because the

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Gnostic worldview is all about monism, not dualism. The idea is to get away from the dualities that exist within this creation and get back to a singular reality where we recognize that we are the same as God.

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It's an interesting religion altogether. So because of that, one of their sacraments was homosexual sex, and they set up a brothel with male cult prostitutes in the

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Temple of Solomon itself. And where were the Levites? Where were the prophets of God?

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Well, if you know your Torah, then you know the Levites were tasked with the job of instructing the people of Israel and Judah in the

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Torah, in the word of God. And we learn from the prophet Jeremiah that the priests were in on it.

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The Levites were going along with it, basically saying, it doesn't matter which deity you worship.

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We worship Yahweh, we worship Asherah, we worship Molech, we worship...

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you get the idea. So the priests were in on it, and they were affirming all of these radical changes.

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And where were the prophets? What were they doing? They were telling the people, despite what the word of God says, and the very condemnations that God has given, that they would stand in judgment of God if they didn't repent of their idolatry.

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The so -called prophets stood up and said, the Lord has told us, no disaster will befall you.

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Don't listen to that guy, Jeremiah, who says that God's going to bring the Babylonians and Nebuchadnezzar, and that Jerusalem is going to be laid waste.

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He's lying. We speak nothing but peace and prosperity and love and hugs and kumbaya, right?

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But who was right? Were they right, or was Jeremiah right? Well, history has borne out the fact that Jeremiah was absolutely telling us the truth.

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And it's important to note that in today's version of Gnosticism, Gnosticism is alive and well, by the way,

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Gnosticism, the Gnostics today, in some of their books, they claim that this time when

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Jeremiah was prophesying, where there had been, well, these false images, these false deities set up as part of the worship in Solomon's temple, the

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Gnostics today claim that that's actual, true Judaism. And there's a fascinating book that was written by one of these

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Gnostics called When God Had a Wife. And so what they teach today, they basically teach that Christianity and monotheistic

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Judaism are aberrations, that they're dangerous, that they're evil, and that true

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Judaism, Yahweh had a wife, and they embraced not only the divine masculine, but the divine feminine, and then everything boils back down to sex and fertility and crops growing and things like this.

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It's very fascinating when you read all this stuff. But the reality is, is that the

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Gnostics have got this dead wrong. Their claims that there is a divine feminine and that God has a cohort, or that Yahweh needed a wife, and it's funny, is that the mystics in later centuries talked about this thing as the

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Shekinah. So if you ever hear any mystic talking about the Shekinah, that's the secret code word talking about the divine feminine, right?

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All of that being said, this is the world into which Jeremiah is speaking, and the words that he gives are true, because none of his words fell to the ground.

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The very judgments that God promised if Judah wouldn't repent were the very judgments that took place, and very few, roughly 5 ,000 and some change, of the people of Judah made it alive out of Nebuchadnezzar's sacking of Jerusalem, and they went into captivity just as Jeremiah said they would.

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Jeremiah's prophecies were true. So speaking into all of this, Jeremiah says, thus says the

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Lord of armies, Yahweh, Sabbaoth, Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you, filling you with vain hopes.

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Note that God is not indifferent to false prophets. God is not lax when it comes to false teachers.

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He wills, according to this prophecy, that people do not listen to them.

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In Titus chapter 1, God specifically says that he wills that false teachers be silenced.

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We are to hear God's voice, not the raving, lunatic nonsense of people who are mad, who've gone crazy, and who are spiritually corrupt.

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God says don't listen to them. They fill you with vain hopes. They speak the visions of their own minds, and they are not speaking from the mouth of Yahweh.

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They continually say to those who despise the word of the Lord, it'll be well with you.

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And everyone who stubbornly follows their own heart, they say, no disaster will come upon you.

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A bunch of liars. That's the point.

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Out goes the wrath of God. Out goes sin, repentance, the forgiveness of sins, bearing fruit and keeping with repentance and walking and conducting your life according to the commands of God.

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In fact, these people were stubbornly refusing to repent, worshiping false gods, and they did it synchronistically.

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It was called syncretism. They would, oh, of course, we worshiped Yahweh, but we worshiped these other deities as well.

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And in the time of Jeremiah, sexual immorality was running amok in Jerusalem, because of course it was.

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People were not living their lives according to the word of God. Injustice and thievery and oppression of people who were poor was also just at an all -time high.

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Sounds a lot like the world that we live in. And where were the so -called prophets of God saying, oh, it's all okay.

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You're the bee's knees. You just need to confess these words. I am blessed. I am rich.

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I am, you get the idea, right? But what they weren't hearing was the message of repentance, or they would reject it outright.

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And these false prophets were just scratching, itching ears. But those ears scratched ears, well, those folks ended up under the wrath of God.

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God then asked, who among them has stood in the counsel of Yahweh to see and to hear his word? Who has paid attention to his word and who has listened?

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Behold the storm of Yahweh. Wrath has gone forth, a whirling tempest, and it will burst on the head of the wicked.

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The anger of Yahweh will not turn back until he has executed and accomplished the intents of his heart.

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And in the latter days, you will understand it. Don't let these people deceive you.

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God will punish sin. If you will not repent and be forgiven, then you are going to have to give an accounting of your own trespasses and pay the penalty in full.

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That's the point. And they sit there and go, well, we live in a day. Don't you think it's a little narrow -minded, a little old -fashioned, a little bit old -school to think that God has wrath?

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I mean, come on. We've all grown up watching the Care Bears, and we know that everything's about rainbows and unicorns.

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Come on, right? But God does have wrath.

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And if you don't believe me, then look at Christ suffering on the cross. The only sinless human being who walked the planet, he bore your sin.

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He suffered the penalty that you and I deserve, and boy, did he suffer a horrible, ignominious, scandalous death.

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He had his back opened with a cat of nine tails before he was nailed to the rough wood of the cross.

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And there, for six hours, he languishes, having a hard time breathing, having to pull himself up in order to breathe, having all of that blood gushing out of him with every breath.

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It was excruciating pain, pain in his arms, pain in his back, pain to breathe.

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He even needed something to drink. And in the midst of all of that, he cried out, my

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God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And indeed, he was forsaken.

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But here's the thing. He was forsaken so that we would not be. He suffered the wrath of God.

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It was burst over his head so that it would not burst over yours or mine. And true preachers that are sent by God, they are to preach the whole counsel of the word of God, which requires them to preach law and gospel, sin and grace, repentance, the forgiveness of sins, and the life empowered by the

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Holy Spirit and bearing fruit in keeping with repentance and obeying the commands of God.

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But false prophets do not preach this message. Instead, the result of their preaching is utter lawlessness.

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And that's the truth. Take a look at the ELCA. Look at what they did back in 08.

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It's interesting to note that the current presiding pastor of the American Association of Lutheran Churches, Dr.

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Cary Larson, he was there in Minneapolis when they were going to make the vote about whether or not to ordain homosexuals.

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And he stood on the ground. He stood at the platform and he begged, do not depart from the word of God.

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And he was told, we are going to do the new thing that the spirit is telling us to do and calling us to do.

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The spirit wasn't telling them anything. In fact, the spirit was speaking through Cary Larson on that day, calling them to repent of the wickedness that they were about to engage in, but they wouldn't.

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And where's the ELCA today? In some woke liberal gutter. They can't even call sin, sin anymore.

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But all of us are capable of this. That is lawlessness. That is the very thing that false teachers lead you into, give you a soft pillow, keep you comfortable while you're on your way to hell.

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God says, I did not send these prophets, yet they ran. I didn't speak to them, yet they prophesied.

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If they had stood in my counsel, then they would have proclaimed my words to my people and they would have turned them from their evil way and from their evil deeds.

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And there it is. Ah, the fruit. The fruit is there. God is teaching us how to inspect the fruit of teachers.

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If they do not turn people away from their evil deeds, but make them comfortable in their sin and help them increase in their lawlessness, they are false teachers.

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They are false prophets. And don't think for a second that this only has to do with people out there.

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Let me remind you that each and every one of us have a false prophet living inside of us, our old sinful

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Adam. Our old sinful Adam says, oh, you go ahead and enjoy that sin.

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God's not going to care. You have a false prophet speaking to your heart today inside of you.

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And I have that same false prophet speaking inside of me. So note, there are false prophets all over the place, but there are also false prophets within, within the church, within our own psyche and our hearts.

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So God asks, am I a God at hand, declares the Lord, not a God far off? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?

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No. Do I not fill heaven and earth? Indeed, God does. I have heard what the prophets have said, who prophesied lies in my name, saying,

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I have dreamed, I have dreamed. How long shall there be lies in the heart of the prophets who prophesied lies, who prophesied the deceit of their own heart, who think to make my people forget my name by their dreams that they tell one another?

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And boy, isn't that always the case? As soon as you start chasing after these fresh words of God, these fresh encounters, these signs and wonders and experiences, the word of God falls by the wayside and becomes almost silent.

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You don't believe me? Go to Sid Roth's, It's Supernatural. Just watch a few episodes and ask yourself this question, where did the word of God go?

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What did they do with the word of God? God's words make no appearances, but all their claims are, this is the new thing that God showed me.

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I went up to heaven and I saw that in heaven there's a body parts room and you can pray and God will send down body parts and heal people and stuff like this.

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It's all the delusions of mad men and mad women, and the result is they no longer hear the voice of God.

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These false prophets prophesied the deceit of their own heart to make people forget his very name.

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This is exactly what Israel did when they went after Baal. So let the prophet who has a dream tell the dream, but let him who has my word faithfully speak my words.

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And there's the word faithfully. It's an important word because there are people who do not faithfully preach God's word.

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They manipulate it, they twist it, they make it void, they saw off all the hard edges in order to make it so that it doesn't offend a single person.

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I remember the late Walter Martin, he used to talk about the false teachers on TBN and how they would always laud the love of God, the love of God, the love of God.

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And he said that they would never say a negative word. And he said they were so sweet and they were so kind, he says, that butter wouldn't even melt in their mouth.

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And when challenged about this, he said those very words while being interviewed on a

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TBN program. One of the co -hosts, a female, looked at him and says, don't you think you could say that with a little bit more positivity?

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And she said, Jesus was really kind and he was all about love, wasn't he?

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And Walter Martin famously responded, and it was beautiful to watch, if you could see the video of it, it's fantastic.

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He beautifully responded, he says, so you believe that Jesus is love incarnate, do you not? Well, of course

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I do. Well, let me read to you the words of love incarnate. Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, you whitewashed tombs, right?

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And he went on in that litany that Christ condemns them. You search high and low, you traveled long distances to make a disciple, and when you're done with him, you make him twice a disciple of hell than you are.

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That's love incarnate speaking. Christ was a repentance preacher. You'll note that he faithfully speaks the word of God to us.

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So what does straw have in common with wheat? Nothing. If you think about it, nothing.

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And Jeremiah here, by the words of God, is comparing the false prophets to those who are trafficking in straw.

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Good luck eating that. It's not a good meal for us, right? But those who speak the truth, they speak words that edify us, that build us up, that feed us.

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That's the wheat. So God asks, is not my word like a fire? Indeed it is. And like a hammer that breaks the rock in pieces?

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Indeed it is. And anybody who wields this word that doesn't break the hard -hearted rocks of our sinful hearts with the word of God is instead teaching and preaching things to you to scratch your itching ears and to not offend you.

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But I would warn you, the world that we live in, the big offense that you can do right now is offend somebody.

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I'm offended by what you said. I'm turning you in to the Facebook police. They're going to put you in Facebook jail for 30 days.

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How dare you offend me by speaking truth? And what do we do?

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A lot of us are tempted to kowtow to the pressure to not offend. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the one you should be worried about offending is

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God himself? I think God is offended by our cowardice.

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I think he's offended by our inability to find and speak the truth. He's offended by our unwillingness to say the words of God because, well, we could get in trouble.

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We could offend somebody. Offend them. Offend them. But don't offend

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God because he is offended by our cowardice. The scriptures make it very clear on the day of judgment in the book of Revelation, cowards are the first thrown into the lake of fire.

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It seems like I got a little bee in my bonnet, doesn't it? Yeah. So brothers and sisters,

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False Prophet Sunday, it's real. It's a real threat. We're at war. Let us repent of all our participation in the false teachings and the false prophecies of those who are telling others that there is no judgment, that there is no harm coming to those who persist in their sin and their unbelief, who engage in rank idolatry and blasphemy, and let us see that we have not only participated in it, that our sinful

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Adam, our sinful nature also raises its voice within us and joins its voice to this chorus of false prophets and false teachers, and daily we must repent.

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But know this, rather than casting the word of God aside, which we ought not to do, even though it hurts to look into the mirror of God's law and to see that we come up short, and it's a painful experience, indeed it's meant to be, that despite all of that,

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God doesn't give us just one word in his word, he gives us two. The law is given to condemn us, and rightly so, but Christ and the gospel are given in order to comfort us and to assure us of God's great love and his mercy.

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So if you listen to the word of God, even though it crushes you, Christ will build you up with confidence that he has forgiven you, that he has made you alive in him, he has washed away your sins, he has declared you to be justified in him, and rather than having the wrath of God in your future, instead you have the peace of God in the inheritance that he has promised and gives us by grace through faith.

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We are foolish to cast the word of God aside because there is no greater comfort than the comfort that comes from the word of God that tells us our sins are forgiven for the sake of Christ.

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The false teachers always tell us God's not going to judge us, but the real teachers tell us that we will be judged if we persist in sin and unbelief, and that Christ has been judged in our place.

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There is no comfort, and it is a delusion to say that God will not act in wrath, he will, but it is also more true that those who are in Christ are forgiven and they will not face the wrath of God because God has done what we could not do by obeying the law perfectly in our stead, forgiving us of all of our sins by Christ's death on the cross and then clothing us in his righteousness.

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We dare not depart from the word of God, this message is faithful and it is true, and not a single word of God will ever fall to the ground, nor can

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God's word be broken. So again, let us repent of breaking the first, second, and third commandments, which we do all too frequently and all too easily, and let us again only hear the faithful words of Scripture, the comforting, assuring words that we are forgiven for Christ's sake.

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In the name of Jesus, amen. 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 And again that address is

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Kungsvinger Lutheran Church 15950 470th

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Avenue NW, Oslo, MN 56744 We thank you for your support.

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