January 5, 2025, Evening Service

The Purpose of the Evening Service and a Teaching Plan for Discernment

What I would ideally like to do, what I think would be helpful, is to sort of structure this, I'd like to keep it in an hour, have roughly 10 minutes of worship, somewhere between 30 and 40 minutes of teaching, and then 10 minutes for questions or discussion or something like that.

Because again, the goal is not to be exactly the same thing that we do on Sunday, but I do want it to be like a worthwhile teaching where we actually take something away from it. So we're not gonna walk through verse by verse books of the Bible, but we're gonna hit up just different topics.

So let's go to the Lord in prayer real quick, and then I'll talk about what we're gonna do this evening. Father, I wanna thank you again, just for this building and this opportunity that we have to gather.

We thank you for the provision that you've so mercifully and so graciously provided us through Good Hope and through Mountain View Chapel and through the work of the people here at Mount Zion who tracked it down and made it happen.

God, we pray that every minute that we spend in here would do nothing but bring you glory, that we would focus on you and who you are and how we can better know you, how we can become more sanctified and how we can better serve you with our lives.

So Lord, we thank you again for this opportunity and we pray that it would be pleasing to you, Lord. We love you and pray all this in Jesus' name, amen. So with that said, what I wanted to do was, I really wanted to get into the topic of discernment.

And I probably just gave this away, but if I hadn't said anything about that and I asked you this question, what did Solomon ask God for? What would you say? You're saying discernment because I already gave it away.

But most people say Solomon asked God for wisdom. Now, obviously, that's a loaded question and I'm asking you that specifically because of what we're talking about. And I believe it's in 1 Kings 3, six through nine.

Then Solomon said, you have shown great love and kindness to your slave, David, my father, according to how he walked before you in truth and righteousness and uprightness of heart towards you. And you have kept for him this great love and kindness that you had given him a son to sit on his throne as it is this day.

So now, oh, Yahweh, my God, you have made your slave king in place of my father, David. Yet I am but a little child. I do not know how to go out or come in. And your slave is in the midst of your people, which you have chosen, a numerous people who are too many to be numbered or counted.

And here it is in verse nine. He says, so give your slave a listening heart to judge your people, to discern between good and evil, for who is able to judge this glorious people of yours? So Solomon, known as one of the wisest kings before obviously the sin in his life sort of made him slip up and made him change, actually asked for discernment.

Now, this is not to say that we don't consider, at wisdom and discernment, it's kind of hard to differentiate between the two. So they're very closely related. While they may not be exactly the same, in some ways, they're almost interchangeable.

But why is this something that I think that we need to talk about? This is me personally, and a lot of the places I've been and the things that I've seen, not just in churches, but in the Christian world anyway.

Defining Discernment and Why the Church Needs It

And that is that the vast majority of Christians, and indeed the vast majority of churches lack discernment tremendously. And we'll get into a little bit of why I say that. But when we talk about discernment, I think we probably need to open up with a definition.

Now, there's a quote from Charles Spurgeon that I really like.

He says,.

Discernment is not knowing the difference between right and wrong, but the difference between right and almost right. So discernment is more than just knowing, again, the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, or what sin is or what sin is not.

It's much more nuanced than that. And that's where everybody gets into so much trouble. That's where churches get into so much trouble and individual Christians. Now, I have a slightly more detailed definition that's gonna set the stage for this whole idea and this whole thing that we talk about.

And this is from an author named Tim Chalies, who wrote a book on discernment. And he says, discernment is the skill of understanding and applying God's word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong.

Discernment is the skill of understanding and applying God's word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong. So I think that's a great definition of discernment to guide us now.

But again, why start a whole new series of services? Why prepare a different message? Why ask you to come out on a Sunday night when we're not accustomed to doing this as a church? And it's because this is important and we all need to understand it.

Now, there's some reasons that I say this. And one of the first reasons is that not everything that's called Christian is actually Christian. People put this label of Christian on a lot of different stuff.

That doesn't meet any biblical definition of Christianity. Now, this is true for Christian music. I'll say Christian. This is true for Christian books. This is true for Christian television, Christian film.

We see that it's called Christian or we see that it talks about Jesus and that gets our guard down. But a lot of these things, if we exercise true discernment, we'll see that they're not as good as we think they are.

And my purpose tonight is not to name things specifically, necessarily, because there are ministries out there that do that and some of them are very helpful. But I don't want to, one, call out churches because in a lot of cases, people are well-meaning and they're trying to do the right thing.

Now, that doesn't excuse a lack of discernment. That doesn't excuse accidental unbiblical teaching, but I don't want to call anybody out necessarily because again, they have good intentions. And it's not my goal to just insult a bunch of people, but to give you the tools to kind of recognize this.

Now, the second reason is more significant and I think that it's that false teachers know enough about Scripture to come off as credible and then they take their teaching and then they weave in what they want you to hear.

They weave in the false teaching, the unbiblical teaching in with language that sounds familiar because it sounds biblical and because they are saying things that are in the Bible, but also adding to it.

Warnings About False Teachers and a False Gospel

Now, what would be the basis for me making a statement like that? Well, it is that Scripture is just chock full of warnings about false teachers. In fact, most people don't necessarily recognize this, but the vast majority of the New Testament is either when it's not talking about Jesus's ministry, but even he does this.

It's both warning about false teachers and it's reinforcing true doctrine. Like, why do you think Paul wrote all these letters to all these different churches because they were all messing up in some way because people that were teaching wrong had come in and started to bring ideas that were different from what Paul had given.

And remember, Paul was an apostle of Jesus. He was giving teaching directly from Jesus, which is a claim that no one beyond Paul can ever make. Now, getting back to the idea that Scripture is full of this, I'm gonna read you a few verses.

Matthew 7, 15, this is Jesus speaking. He says, beware of false prophets who come to you in sheep's clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. We have Colossians 2, 8. See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world and not according to Christ.

Then we have the first half of Hebrews 13, 9. Do not be carried away by varied and strange teachings. First John 4, 1 says, beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

Believe it or not, we're not done yet. Ephesians 5, 6, let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things, the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Jude 1, 4, the letter of Jude is one chapter, but it's entirely about false teaching.

It says, for certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

And then we have 2 Timothy 4, 3 -4. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.

So we have to ask ourselves then, we read all these verses, and again, that's a small sample. That's a representative sample, but there's so much more that we could read. We could spend the whole time reading warnings about false teachings and a false gospel.

So why is so much of the New Testament dedicated to this? Like, why do we see this over and over? Why do we see them calling out false teachers? And why do we see them, especially Paul, specifically laying out doctrine?

And the answer is this. The answer is, and this is hard for some people to understand. True biblical Christianity is not just some set of vague principles. It's not something that's open to different interpretations.

But the truth is, Christianity is a very specific set of doctrines. It's a very specific set of concepts. And for some of them, there can be absolutely no compromise on those doctrines, or you no longer have Christianity.

Christianity is not subject to our feelings. It's not subject to our opinions. It's not subject to different theories about what might be. And you can't claim that you're a follower of Christ and not hold 100 to what God's Word says in our canon of Scripture.

So I talked to the students earlier. We're starting to just, again, talk about the Bible and the 66 books that make up God's revelation to us. And this is very prevalent in our Christian world today. You can't say that you believe the Bible except for a few parts that you don't like.

You can't take out ideas that are here that you disagree with because you can't change God's Word. So what this means is that there's no way that you can be kind of Christian. You can't be a little Christian.

That's like being a little pregnant, right? You're either completely pregnant or you're completely not pregnant. There's no in-between. There are phases, but there's no way that you're just kind of pregnant.

And you can't do that with Christianity either. There's no middle ground. And I know that this is probably a hard truth as well, but with Christianity, it's true. You're either all the way in or you're all the way out.

You can't just stick your toe in because that will not get you salvation. You can learn about it. You can be learning. You can be growing. You can be experimenting, but just because you believe that Jesus was the Son of God, but you don't believe something else about Jesus, you have the same fate as somebody who does not believe in the Bible at all.

And again, I know that's challenging for people, but if we look at Matthew 12, 30, Jesus says this. He says, he who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. But the idea that we can take what we want, the idea that there's some kind of subjective truth that we can sort of take this part of the Bible, but not that part, it's really a product of our day and age.

It's a product of our culture. It's a product of our educational system. It's a product of the way that we view our own lives where we believe that we're entitled to whatever we want, whenever we want it, however we want it, no matter what other people want.

And that is not how the Bible operates. But unfortunately, even a lot of churches operate that way. And the reason they do it is this. They say, well, if we said stuff like what I'm saying right now, if we said stuff like that to people, well, people that aren't Christians wouldn't wanna show up.

They don't like hearing stuff like that. And if they don't show up, then they're not gonna hear the gospel. But I would tell you that if you kept the difficult stuff from Scripture back from those people, they still won't hear the gospel even if they do come to your church because the gospel in and of itself is offensive.

The gospel in and of itself, if you don't accept it, is insulting because the gospel in and of itself is that you are a sinner and other than, you know, aside from the work of Christ, there's no hope for you.

And again, that flies in the face of what we want to believe about ourselves and what we want to be told about ourselves because we want our self-esteem built up. We don't wanna be told that there's anything bad about us.

But I wanna clarify that none of this is done in a hateful way. None of this is done in a vindictive way, an accusatory way, because that would be wrong too. But all the same, we're not at liberty to change what the Word of God says.

But despite the best of intentions that a lot of churches have, this is still exactly what is happening. People are afraid to tell the straight-up truth to people about their condition because they don't wanna offend people or they don't want them to stop coming to their church.

So over time, these messages get compromised. Now, I brought this book because J .C. Ryle is one of my favorite pastors and authors, but this is how this looks. This is how false doctrine sort of creeps into the church and sometimes it takes over.

He says, false doctrine does not meet men face-to-face and proclaim that it is false. It does not blow a trumpet before it and endeavor openly to turn us away from the truth as it is in Jesus. It does not come before men in broad day and summon them to surrender.

It approaches us secretly, quietly, insidiously, plausibly, and in such a way as to disarm man's suspicion and throw him off his guard. It is the wolf in sheep's clothing and Satan in the guard of an angel of light who have always proved the most dangerous foes of the church of Christ.

And I'll also tell you, so that's how it kind of sneaks in. Some people do have the idea that as long as your intentions are good, it's okay if you accidentally teach something wrong. But I would tell you that I can't find a biblical justification for that.

I can't find examples in scripture where your good intentions override your false teaching, even if it was accidental. If you turn back, I believe it's in Deuteronomy, we have a couple of priests who offered up strange fire, right?

Do you remember that? They sort of went about worship in their own way, not in the way that God had very specifically ordained, as we see in some of those earlier books, and God killed them. Now, when David and his folks were moving the, oh my gosh, I lost my words here.

When they were moving the altar, it was on a cart. It hit a bump in the road and it was about to fall. And a guy put his hands on it to steady it. Best of intentions, right? He didn't want this thing to fall.

This is a holy thing. He didn't want it to hit the ground. And he touched it, but because he wasn't one of the people that could touch it, God killed him. So I would submit to you that your intentions don't override false teaching.

And that may not be important for all of you, but it's important for pastors to know. It's important for churches to know, because teachers are judged more harshly. So you can't just say you don't know, you gotta learn.

And if a pastor can't discern, then we have even bigger problems there. Now I wanna read Matthew chapter seven, verses 21 through 23. Matthew 7, 21 through 23. Because this is the result of a lack of discernment in teaching.

This is the result of teaching a halfway gospel. This is also the result of thinking the simple fact that you go to church or the simple fact that you serve is enough. And I know I've read this before, but this is important.

So Matthew 7, 21. Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. But he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, in your name did we not prophesy and in your name cast out demons and in your name do many miracles.

And then I will declare to them, I never knew you, depart from me, you who practice lawlessness. So it's not enough just to look Christian. It's not enough to just look religious. So let's go back to that definition of discernment because now we're getting into why this is such an important thing.

Discernment is the skill of understanding and applying God's word with the purpose of separating truth from error and right from wrong. And this is what's going to prevent you from going wrong in your Christian walk.

It's what's gonna prevent you from wasting time on resources that aren't worth it. It's what's going to prevent you from attending churches that are twisting or perverting the word of God, whether they're doing it intentionally or not.

And we also have to understand this principle. Like don't make this mistake. You are expected to grow in your discernment. Every one of you as individual Christians are expected to learn. You're expected to grow.

You're expected to become more spiritually mature. And the Bible tells us this as well. I'm not just making these things up so I have something to say. Proverbs 4, 5 says, acquire wisdom, acquire understanding.

Again, we can use wisdom for discernment. James 1, 5 says this, but if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God who gives to all generously and without reproach and it will be given to him. And James is telling us here that you should pray for wisdom.

You should ask for it. If you don't have it, you need to get it and God will give it to you. God answers prayers that are according to his will. And a prayer for wisdom is an example of that. Finally, we look at what the writer of Hebrews says in chapter five, where he, chapter five, verses 11 through 14, where he's scolding a number of people.

Hebrews 5, 11 through 14. He says, concerning him we have much to say and it is hard to explain since you have become dull of hearing. For though by this time you ought to be teachers, you have need again for someone to teach you the elementary principles of the oracles of God.

And you have come to need milk and not solid food. For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature who because of practice have their senses trained to discern both good and evil.

And what that means, what that means is you're expected to grow. And if your church is not giving you what you need to grow, you either go somewhere else or you find it yourself. But it's not an excuse to say that I wasn't taught.

As I mean, he's telling these people, you should be teachers at this point as long as this church has been around, but you still need the Sunday school lesson. So we wanna grow spiritually, we wanna learn.

Discerning Sound Teaching from What Is False

This all sounds easy, right? Because I think we all want to be discerning Christians. I think we all want to be able to do this. So then we ask what could possibly go wrong with this desire? And to see that we look at John 6, 60 through 66.

And this is something that I did read recently. I think it was last week when we were talking about the suffering servant. John 6, 60 through 66. Therefore, many of his disciples when they heard this, which can just be referring to the teachings, when they heard this said, this is a difficult statement, who can listen to it?

But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling at this said to them, does this cause you to stumble? What then if you see the son of man ascending to where he was before? The spirit is the one who gives life, the flesh profits nothing.

The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life. But there are some of you who do not believe for Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe and who it was that would betray him.

And he was saying, for this reason, I have said to you that no one can come to me unless it has been granted him by the father. Verse 66, as a result of this, many of his disciples went away and were not walking with him anymore.

So what can we take away from this when it comes to the idea of being discerning and the idea of growing in your knowledge of Christ? It shows us that this is not what everybody wants. And when this is something that you pursue, or when this is something that a church pursues, people will walk away because it's not easy.

It's not comfortable. It's often confrontational to your feelings. And if people aren't fully committed to the word of God, then they're gonna leave. It's mind boggling to look at this in scripture to see people who were walking with Jesus.

Now, again, there's a lot of people that didn't know who he was. They didn't actually think he was the Messiah, so they didn't believe it. But they heard this teaching and they took off. But his disciples knew who he was.

They believed, and that's why they stayed. But even Jesus's teaching repelled people. Even Jesus's teaching pushed people out of the church. So we shouldn't be afraid to at least say the truth. Again, I don't ever want to offend people just for the sake of offending people.

And I don't wanna offend people with my words or my opinions or my thoughts. But if I offend someone with what the Bible says, then so be it. And that's how we have to operate. We can't be concerned about things like that.

So the point of this is, realistically, what will happen is that you will start earnestly searching the scriptures. And you will start to, through the power of the Holy Spirit, you'll start to understand what's going on in scripture.

And when you do that, you're gonna start seeing things that are wrong. You're gonna see it, now I'm talking to all you and you go to my church, so, you will start seeing things in the church that maybe aren't the way they should be according to scripture.

And if you've been to other churches, you might know this is the case too. But if you even so much as question the wrong things that you see, you may just face a backlash from the people that are benefiting from the things that are wrong.

And again, I stand up here saying this, knowing that, you know, I'm telling you that you need to be equipped to call me out if I'm doing something wrong, right? So hopefully I'm not gonna give you a backlash if you're properly correcting me.

But I've been in situations where that has happened. You know, well-meaning people did not like even a question asked about what they were doing. So you'll face a backlash from people that are less discerning.

2 Timothy 3 .12 says this, indeed, all who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted. And why is this? Well, we go back to that verse from 2 Timothy 4 .3, which is not that far. 2 Timothy 4 .3, for the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance with their own desires.

So then when you start to exercise discernment and you say, or somebody asks you, have you heard the song? Have you watched the show? Have you read this book? You might say something like, well, I read it, but I didn't think that it was right.

Well, somebody who loves that book or loves that song or loves that show, they'll be upset because they'll feel like you are judging them personally for not going along with their opinion because you have exercised some discernment.

So you can expect that if you start to do this, you will get pushback and people will push back hard. And they'll do things like call you a Pharisee. They'll call you a legalist. All for trying to respect scripture.

Avoiding Legalism While Pursuing Wisdom

So let's think briefly about how practically we can avoid being a legalist or being a Pharisee, because that is a very real danger of this too. Because we don't wanna acquire some knowledge. We don't wanna acquire some understanding and then think it's our job to go around to everybody out there without being asked and tell them the things that they're doing that are wrong and tell them the things they're listening to, the things they're watching, the things they're reading are wrong.

Because if they don't ask you, then you're really not gonna be received well. And that's maybe not the best way to go about it. So let's look at a couple of ways that we can do this. And the first one is simply, don't be obnoxious.

Don't be a jerk to people, right? There are people out there. I see stuff from churches, the books they're reading in their Bible studies. I see it on Facebook and I'm like, oh my gosh, like that is not something they should be spending their time with.

But you don't wanna just fire off a comment or go insult somebody. That's not the way to do it. In fact, if it's not your business, maybe you have to stay out of it. But if somebody asks you, you can certainly share.

Now, the second thing you have to be sure of is that you truly understand what scripture says. Like you need to know that you're reading this properly. You need to know that you understand. You don't wanna just go read a passage, think you know what it means, and then go out and start blasting people.

Make sure that you understand this. And believe me, we're gonna get to that, not tonight, but as we move forward. The next thing you need to do is desire that the Holy Spirit shows them the truth, but also shows you the truth, right?

This is what you should want. We don't want to judge people. We don't want to criticize people so that they'll know we're right, so that they'll know we're holy, or they'll know we're smart, right? That is being a Pharisee.

We want people to truly know the real word of God and to be changed by the Holy Spirit and to truly receive salvation. That should be your desire, not to prove yourself right. And the fourth thing is that we need to understand what issues are truly important.

And that is going to be the focus of what we do going forward from here. So we have to understand what doctrines are the most important and what doctrines are ones that it's okay to hold differing views on, because there are some things that Scripture doesn't speak clearly about.

There are some things it does speak very clearly about, and those, particularly salvation, would be an example of this. The way you receive salvation and what you have to do is very clear, but maybe something like the mode of baptism is not quite as clear, and people can be good Christians and disagree on that.

So you have to understand doctrines. Now, this gets down to something else that I think is important. You don't wanna spend a whole lot of time looking for what's false. Some people do that. Some people say, well, how can I talk to a Mormon, or how can I talk to a Catholic, or how can I talk to Jehovah's Witness?

And they spend so much time studying these things that they don't actually study Christian Scripture to understand. When banks are training people to handle money, counterfeiting is a big issue, right?

Well, how do you think they train people to detect counterfeit money? You teach them to handle the real thing. You don't give people a whole bunch of different counterfeit bills in order to learn how to spot counterfeit money.

You get so used to training, or so used to handling real money that it's obvious when a counterfeit comes in. And the same principle applies to us with Scripture. You don't need to go out and study false doctrine.

You don't need to listen to all that stuff and figure out how to fight it. You need to get into your Bible and make sure that you know what this says so that you can truly discern what's real from error.

And again, I wanna say this very clearly. This is not about looking out into the world and seeing all the things that the world is doing wrong. This is not about judging people that aren't Christians.

Because that should be obvious.

And if you can't do that, then you don't need to talk to anybody about discernment. You do need to spend time in Scripture, right? If you can't look at a TV show and see all the ways that they're just corrupting a marriage relationship or corrupting sexual relationships between people, then yes, you need to spend more time in the Bible.

This is about being able to discern when somebody on the internet who claims to be a prophet is saying something and why it's not true. This is listening to somebody who claims to be a pastor preaching something like the prosperity gospel and using real Scripture to do it and knowing why that's not right.

So what we're gonna do going forward is we're gonna look at different Christian doctrines so that we understand them. We understand what it means, what the Bible has to say about it. So again, what I'm laying out now for you is like the path forward from tonight, what we're gonna be going to do.

So again, in order to discern, you have to understand and you have to know what the real truth is, what the absolute truth of God's word is. And that is how we're gonna discern real from counterfeit. That's how we're gonna be able to tell right from almost right.

Now, does anybody have any questions about that? I told, when we had the students earlier, I said, okay, now I'm gonna do the riskiest thing in the world and I'm gonna open it up to questions. And it's not risky because you might ask me a question I don't know the answer to.

It's risky because you won't ask any questions and we'll just stand here awkwardly silent for the next 10 minutes. But yeah, does anybody have questions about this topic or about anything related to it?

Because again, this is where we'll be for, we'll be here for a little while for the next few weeks as we talk about this. So it's almost like a foundations of the faith kind of thing that we're gonna do going forward.

No, I don't know exactly when the snow's gonna start or how much we're gonna get. So get that question. Yeah, I'm gonna put these up like I do. Well, thank you for coming tonight. Yeah, I'm gonna put the recordings up just like we do on the Sunday morning services.

Yeah, and I encourage you to bring people and you can email them in. You can text me during the service and that's right. I'll keep this up here and it'll light up in front of me. Okay, so that's where we are.

If nobody has any questions, that's fine.

We'll

Yeah, please do.

A Question About The Purpose Driven Life and Proof Texting

Yeah, so the purpose-driven life, what ultimately winds up being the problem with that book is that the author, he really plays kind of fast and loose with scripture. So when I talk on Sunday mornings about having to take verses in their context, right?

You have to understand everything that's going on around it. You can't just pull out a verse and give it its own meaning. And that's a lot of what he does. So not only does he do that, that's called proof texting.

He'll pull out a verse and use it. And that book obviously is very focused on your individual growth, which is good. And there is good stuff about it, but this is a great question because it's a great example.

So not only do we have kind of a flawed premise that God uses 40-day periods to change people's lives, right, that's the premise of the book. Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days. We had 40 days of flooding.

So God changes the world in 40 days. While that's not inherently harmful, it is a misuse of scripture because think about how God changes other people. God changed Paul instantly. So there's that, but like I said, probably the biggest issue is taking scripture verses out of context specifically to prove a point.

Now, I have other issues and it's like, who am I? But other issues with Rick Warren and the way he does his church, it's kind of a felt needs sort of model. Like they went out and did surveys of the community to see what people wanted in a church and then they built up a church that way.