Spiritual Depression Pt. 13: False teaching

False Teaching as the Cause of Spiritual Depression

All right, we're continuing our study. This is session 13 in our study of the book Spiritual Depression by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, and as you saw there, the topic for tonight is false teaching. We're going to start by reading the first parts of the first chapter of the book of Galatians, and I'm going to read the introduction because I think that sets the stage, and we'll just make a couple of comments.

Paul, an apostle, not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. I just want to pause there. Very often, in fact, too often, when we read the epistles, we brush by the introductions and the salutations, but there is a lot contained just in that sentence, and it has to do with what follows.

Notice there's kind of a parenthetical phrase. Paul is an apostle, not sent from men nor through the agency of man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead. What the apostle is doing, he's setting his credentials for what's going to follow, and that's what I want you to make yourself aware of, because, well, as you'll see, the apostolic authority is very important, especially in this epistle, in any epistle, but definitely in this one, all right?

And all the brethren who are with me to the churches of Galatia, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins so that he might rescue us from this present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forevermore.

Amen. Now, that's the opening, that's the introduction, the salutation of the letter, if you will, okay? But it does contain important information. The next four verses are what we're going to focus on mostly tonight, but you have to remember, you could really take this whole epistle, because there is a continual theme throughout the whole letter, and so we got to be careful when we cut it up into pieces.

The Galatians Deserting the Gospel

But this is what I want to focus on. I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel, which is really not another, only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ.

But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is to be accursed. As we have said before, so I say again now, if any man is preaching to you a gospel contrary to what you have received, he is to be accursed.

Now, this is what we're going to use for most of what we're doing tonight. Starting out how we typically do, this is the opening paragraph of the chapter 13 in the book, and he says, I call your attention to that question addressed by the apostle to the members of the churches in Galatia, in order that we may consider together another cause of spiritual depression or unhappiness in Christian life.

The whole of the epistle to the Galatians really deals with this one question. These Galatians had listened to the preaching of the gospel by the apostle Paul. They had been typical Gentile pagans. They were outside God.

They had no knowledge whatsoever of him or of his son or of the great Christian salvation. But the apostle Paul had come and preached to them, and they had received the message of the gospel with great joy.

He describes even in detail their joy when they had first met him and when he had first preached to them. Now again, we're not going to go through all of the verses that support that, but I would suggest you can do that on your own and reading through the entire epistle.

It's only six short chapters. So, notice the background that is being set up here. He's giving us a little bit of the information. Galatian church was primarily Gentile, all right, although there were Jews.

We know that Paul always went and he went to the Jew first throughout the entire book of Acts. But they were no longer like that. They had become unhappy, and he is constrained to ask them, where is then the blessedness you speak of?

They had become unhappy in themselves, and they had almost turned against the apostle. Their condition was one which was so depressed that he could even use this kind of language, my little children of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you.

One of the things that we see in the epistle to the Galatians is the passion of Paul's heart, and that's something you don't want to miss either. The subject that he's dealing with, this false teaching, was so offensive to Paul and so crucial to the church that we see the passion of Paul come out.

We even saw it in the two verses in verses eight and nine where he repeats himself, okay. He says, I say again to you, if anyone comes preaching a different gospel other than what has been preached to you, let him be anathema, let him be accursed.

He says, now the question which he puts to them about their former blessedness is most striking. Indeed, he has been putting it in other forms in the earlier parts of his letter to them. In the sixth verse of the first chapter, he says, I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel.

Then he puts it again in the third chapter in the first verse, O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth before whose eyes Jesus Christ has been evidently set forth, crucified among you.

You can read that, and without changing the meaning, you can see his passion in there. One of the things that I'm acutely aware of as a pastor, especially someone who is a preaching pastor, and I've preached somewhere around 2 ,000 sermons over the course of my time as a pastor, something in that range, and that is reading the scripture, and too often we find ourselves reading it impassionately, you know, just reading pages on the book, and that is a mistake.

These apostles put their heart and soul into these letters. They were written because they were afraid. Look at what Paul says. Who has bewitched you? I fear for you, and we see that in all of Paul's letters.

He was a passionate man, especially in his writings. Now, without adducing further evidence, I think it is clear that these Galatian Christians, who had been so happy, so rejoicing in their newfound salvation, had now become spiritually unhappy and depressed, and that sets up what we're going to look at tonight, all right?

So, what was the cause of the change between when Paul preaches and they accepted the gospel? What was the problem that wrought the change in them? Why were they spiritually depressed? And, you know, again, you don't see those words in the scripture, but you can tell that's what Paul is getting at.

The answer is clear. They were subject to false teaching. That is the purpose, the main overriding purpose of the book of Galatians, is to turn the Galatian churches back to the pure gospel because they had been influenced by false teaching, okay?

That's the subject of this chapter in the book, chapter 13, and the example he uses is the Galatian church. Now, he uses the Galatian church. He had a great quote, but it just wasn't that relevant. He says, I'm not particularly interested in the history of the Galatian church, you know, but it's important for us to look at that history and understand because it is so relevant to us today.

I'll even say this now, that there is not an error in any of the New Testament epistles that the apostles had to deal with that is not alive and well today. It may take on some different forms, different names, all right, but every single one is there, all right?

So, what was happening in Galatia? The Jewish believers were being told that for a Gentile to become a Christian, he also had to become a Jew and be circumcised. Now, that's a gross oversimplification because the whole, we got six chapters where Paul is dealing with this, but that's the essence of it.

They had no problem, well, they did have a problem at first with Gentiles becoming Christians, all right, but once they got over that, they had no problem with them coming into the churches, but then they said, but wait a minute, you got to be circumcised.

That's the heresy, and they made it a necessity. In order to be saved, you had to be circumcised, okay? And Paul, as we see, was passionate in his refutation of this teaching, and in fact, it's in the second chapter of the same book of Galatians where Paul had to rebuke Peter, because Peter had started to back away and starting to allow some of this false teaching in, and you can even see the passion of Paul when he's addressing Peter.

Why does he feel this passion? Why is he so moved? The answer is, of course, that he felt that the very Christian standing and position of these people was at stake, and that unless they saw the truth of this matter, their whole Christian position might very well be in jeopardy.

You see what he's saying, is Paul recognized that if this goes unchecked, they might move so far into heresy that they actually cease to be a Christian church, so we need to be very cautious when we deal with any of these problems that come into the church today.

Now, that shows the importance of the epistle for us today, all right? As I mentioned before, there's not a heresy or major error that's taught in the New Testament that is not alive and well, not only in cults, but within, quote, evangelical churches today.

I think I just said this, there is not a single problem or heresy described, see, I think just like the doctor does, so there's not a single problem or heresy described in the New Testament that you will not find in some shape or form in the church at this moment.

Now, again, when is he writing this? Back around 1950, okay? All right, we are not engaged in a mere academic discussion of spiritual depression. We are talking about ourselves, and we are talking to one another, and it is because these things are still with us, and because the Galatian heresy in a modern form is still with us that I am calling your attention to it, all right?

Four Forms of False Teaching

So, again, do you notice something interesting? As passionate as the Apostle Paul was, Martin Lloyd-Jones is just that passionate, and he was concerned about his day in the church, and unfortunately, in England where he was ministering, it's gotten worse over the last 70 years, okay?

The main heading of this cause of spiritual depression is false teaching. That's what we're going to just call this, that's why this whole chapter is just called false teaching, all right? However, false teaching can appear in several different forms, and you're going to see, I think I've picked out four subcategories, if you will, to talk about false teaching, and they are all somewhat related, but I think you can make distinctions between them.

What they have in common is that they are all false. First, the first form is outright denial of truth, all right? Bold statements saying the message of Scripture, the gospel is false. I mean, we have people like that, the atheism, humanism, anti-theism, okay?

Everybody familiar with the anti-theism, what that means, difference between atheism and anti-theism? Yeah, Christopher Hitchens was a proponent of anti-theism. He says that he's against theism because it is bad.

It's bad for society. It's bad for mankind. So, that's why he says, I'm further than atheism. It's not just that I don't believe. I'm saying that if you believe in it or teach it, you're bad, okay? So, that's the most obvious form of false teaching.

The second form is close to it, but somewhat different, and that's just we're contradiction of truth, all right? Those who would negate or deny certain essential elements of Scripture. In other words, they don't necessarily deny that there's a God, all right?

But they deny that certain things taught in Scripture is true. For example, you'd find them denying the deity of Christ. Now, we know there are many cults who deny the deity of Christ. They also, some others, deny the humanity of Christ, all right?

The doctrine of the Trinity comes under attack. If you see any of these forms of contradicting the truth, it is false teaching, all right? And there can be no, you know, if they go this far, there can be no accommodation.

There can be no, quote, Christian fellowship with people that teach such things. They may even claim to be Christian, but deny the reality of these essential doctrines, all right? And again, if we wanted to take the time, we could put up a list of who holds to these type of doctrines.

So that's the second form. The third form is taking away from the essential doctrines. In other words, pulling things out of Scripture. Denying, for example, like the necessity of baptism or denying the necessity of celebrating the Lord's Supper, all right?

There are, quote, evangelical churches who are hyper-dispensational, who believe that baptism was an old covenant ordinance, and so they do not have, they will not baptize, water baptism in their churches.

Some, the Lord's Supper, they take it away, all right? And anything else where they, so this, you can see that this false teaching is removing things from Scripture. There are cults that strip the Scriptures of many essentials.

The fourth is adding to the Scriptures, all right? And that's the era that we're talking about specifically in the churches in Galatia. This is, they added to the Scripture. They added old covenant practices to the new covenant church, in the case of the church in Galatia.

It was the necessity that when you come to faith, yes, you need to be baptized, but you also need to be circumcised. And that was held up to be a necessity, okay? Now, you can probably think of quite a few churches today or cults today who fall into this category, all right?

Many churches guilty of this form of false teaching today didn't put it in there, all right? But what it all winds up doing, usually what happens here is it denies the necessity of faith alone. We'll get to that a little bit later.

Authority, Scripture, and the Test of True Doctrine

So, what's the remedy for false teaching, okay? All right, this is, I want you to hold onto your seat. This is going to blow you away. How can we identify it? The answer is rather simple. It comes to a question of authority.

It's really that simple. There is no mind-blowing answer to this. It is really, this is the essence of it, and if you're ever going to come against false teaching, this is what you have to remember. You have to come down here, all right?

How many people have followed James White's debates on Roman Catholicism? All right, a few. There was a time when he was coming out every, I think he did every year for about 10 years, he did a debate out here.

And the interesting thing, if you ever follow his debates, especially with Rome, all right, it always comes back at some point, he's going to come back and he's going to say, well, you know even though you're debating Mary, debating the Mass, or whatever it is, he comes down, he says, well, really it's a question of authority.

It's a question of Sola Scriptura. And that's the answer here. It comes down to a question of authority. The apostles were given authority by Jesus Christ himself. That's why I pointed out in the very beginning, in that first chapter of Galatians, where Paul puts that parenthetical phrase in there, I didn't get my authority from men, or even from a church council.

He says, I received it directly from Jesus Christ. And remember, the apostles at first were standoffish to Paul, because they had been with him physically for three and a half years, and Paul had not.

But then when they heard his story, that Christ appeared to him in the flesh and directly commissioned him, that qualifies him to be an apostle. But Paul has to defend that apostle, that apostleship. He does it in here, he does it in 2 Corinthians, and so that's why, because if you're going to refute false teaching, you have to have some authority behind you.

And Paul spends time in this epistle defending his apostleship, because that is the basis of his rebuke. If you look at verses, in chapter 1, verses 8 and 9, where he rebukes them, what gives him the authority to, and it's a stinging rebuke, he says, if anybody let him be anathema, what is the basis for that?

Because he was called directly by Christ and commissioned by Christ, that's what gave him the authority. And Paul calls this teaching a different gospel. But he also says it's a distorted gospel. In fact, he says it's no gospel at all.

In other words, by what appears to be somewhat of a simple addition, negates the whole doctrine of the gospel. That's the danger. The gospel of Jesus Christ, as announced and taught in the New Testament, claims nothing less than that it comes with the authority of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, who gave it to these men, who in turn preached it and caused it to be written.

Here is the only standard, and it is still the only standard. Okay, so what does this look like for us today? Following are some practical steps or questions to ask when faced with something new, or something purported to be new.

If anybody comes to you and says, wait, I've heard this new teaching, your antenna should go, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, the antenna should go up. All right, warning, warning, you know, like Robbie the robot, warning, warning, warning.

All right, so here's some practical steps. How do we refute this false teaching? Always under the authority of Scripture. So the first step would be, how does this teaching compare with Scripture? That's where you have to go.

Doesn't matter what church council, doesn't matter, you know, what confession of faith you use, you have to compare it with the Scripture. Okay, remember, even our 1689 London Baptist Confession, which we love, we hold dear, but we make sure that everybody understands this is underneath the authority of Scripture.

And there's actually a couple of sections in there, you know, a couple of phrases and words that I would like to see changed, because the framers of it, while they did a magnificent job, and my hats are off to my love those guys for what they did, but I think there's a couple of things, they're not perfect, and so that's just one man's opinion.

Now this is rather obvious, but it needs to be said, because sometimes we can get so caught up in our defense, in our apologetic for the faith, that we forget where we're standing, you know, we have to make sure we're always standing on the rock, we're standing on the teaching, the apostolic teaching, okay.

If the practice or the doctrine doesn't agree with Scripture, Paul's rebuke is in order. And there's, there are some people in churches that claim to be evangelical, that are denying certain doctrines, and we need to be able to tell them, if you do not change, you are anathema, according to the Scripture, and I'm not pronouncing that on you, but the Scripture is pronouncing that.

So first step is teaching, compare it with Scripture. Second, what are the implications of the teaching or practice? Maybe it's, you can't, maybe you can't find chapter and verse that absolutely refutes it, then find out what are the implications, okay.

I'll just mention hyperpreterism, all right. Hyperpreterism teaches that, you know, that Christ came back in 70 AD, that was the second coming, and there is no more, right, you say, well, isn't that just a matter of opinion, you know, and we all have different eschatological views and whatnot, but start and run through the implications of that view, and you find out that major doctrines have to be sacrificed.

So even though it may sound not necessarily, well, because we know that there are people in our church, we have some who are pre-millennial, some are millennial, and some post-millennial. We have all three views, but the hyperpreteristic view actually sacrifices some of the essential doctrines of Scripture, which means, we'll call it what it is, heresy.

Look at the example of Paul, starting in the second chapter of Galatians. Again, Paul's works, I love reading Paul's letters, I love reading Peter's and John's too, but anyway, I just love the way Paul's mind thinks, he's so logical, the way he puts it forth, and what he does is he starts, and this is exactly what he does in the second chapter, he shows if you believe this, all right, these are the implications, and they're severe implications, and so we see him standing on the Scripture and then showing the implications of how, where this teaching will take you, all right, and it's it's not good.

He systematically, that's supposed to be shows, he systematically shows the results of the teaching of the Judaizers and how it ends up denying salvation by faith alone. That's his conclusion. Third, examine the history and the origin of the teaching or practice.

All right, we have some new teaching that has come into our society, and if you go back and examine the history or the origin of the teaching or the practice, whatever it is, the error will be easily revealed.

Quite often, it was the result of visions or dreams or someone claiming authority they do not have legitimately. How was the Church of the Latter-day Saints, how was that formed? Joseph Smith gets a vision, all right, and writes this book, all right.

He has no apostolic authority to do so, okay, and so if you examine the history and the origin of it, you'll find somewhere along the line, as Shakespeare said, something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

It's also the result of pragmatic thinking, all right. You'll find a lot of practices come into the Church or a lot of doctrines based upon what works, all right. That's the shortened view of pragmatism is.

If it works, use it, all right, and we find out that's not what the Scripture teaches. You have to have authority for any practice that comes into the Church. Fourth, error can often be seen in that it emphasizes one doctrine or practice above all the rest.

If you go into a church and all they talk about is this one particular doctrine, you got to look around. There's going to be other problems because error begets error. I remember, I don't know how many people here remember the gold dust blessing from Toronto.

Supposedly, they were a big charismatic church, and the next thing you know, supposedly gold dust was falling from the sky. It's the next thing. Everybody's rushing to Toronto because they want to get the Toronto blessing, and that's all anybody talked about.

What happened to the gospel, the pure gospel, getting people safe instead of going up, and then after that, it was laughing in the spirit. If you didn't laugh in the spirit, it was crazy. But anyway, in Galatia, circumcision became the deciding factor.

Fifth, most often, false teaching ultimately denies the sufficiency of faith alone. There's one of the major clues. As soon as you have somebody, if you're engaged in a conversation with somebody, and you mention faith, and they say faith, and, or faith, yes, I believe in faith alone, but as soon as you start hearing that, again, those antennas should go up.

It's always faith plus something else. The apostle says this in the concluding chapter of this epistle, but may it never be that I would boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

This is right near the end of his exposition of false teaching, and basically what he's saying is there's a lot of good things that go on in the church, but I'm only going to boast in the Lord Jesus Christ and what he has done, not in man's work, not in our, even in our confession of faith.

No, who do we boast in? We're not, I hope, and I hope everybody understands, I love the 1689 confession, but if we ever get to a point where we elevate that and use that as our test for, you know, unless you believe the 1689, no.

There's a lot of good churches out there that don't hold to the 1689. I wish they did, but that's neither here nor there. Paul says it best, never be that I would boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Boasting Only in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ

Conclusion. Let me put it plainly. I will not make my boast, I will not glory even in my orthodoxy, for even that can be a snare if I make a god of it. I will glory only in that blessed person himself by whom this great thing has been done, with whom I died, with whom I have been buried, with whom I am dead to sin and alive unto God, and with whom I have risen, with whom I am seated in the heavenly places, by whom and by whom alone the world is crucified to me, and I am crucified unto the world.

Anything that wants to come into the center instead of him, anything that wants to add itself onto him, I shall reject. Knowing the apostolic message concerning Jesus Christ in all its directness, its simplicity, and its glory, God forbid that any one of us should add anything to it.

Let us rejoice in him, in all his fullness, and in him alone. Questions? Yes?

So in terms of spiritual depression, what was the connection that you were making with this past congelation? Was it referring to specifically like when you start to entertain the opinions of men, in a way, so as to get our focus off the foundation of God, the.

Authority of God's word in our lives? Yeah, what happens is they were taking the freedom that they had in Christ and the joy that they experienced. Well, let me put it this way. Do you remember when you were first saved?

Okay, bad example. Do you remember when you first came to realization you were saved? All right, that's a better question, all right, because I understand not everybody can point to that. Did you experience joy, relief, happiness, understanding that God had saved you and what your future was?

All right, now I tell you that's not good enough. You got to do this, you got to do that, and you're now back into bondage, and what happens to your joy? It diminishes, and you lose it, and because you are now in bondage to things that my salvation depends on things that I have to do.

I will never forget the day, not that I was saved, but the day that I came to understand the doctrines of grace. I was sitting, I had built a little closet in the house I had many years ago, and Ginger and I had built a little cubby, little room that we called our prayer closet, and we had all of our resources in there, Bible and whatnot.

We would go in there to pray because we had a bunch of little kids running around the house, you know, so we built this little thing, and I was going in there, and somebody had just explained to me the doctrines of grace, and I was going through the scriptures.

I was reading Romans 8 and 9, and when it hit me, it took my breath away, and I put my head down on the desk, and I cried to understand that God saved me. I didn't make an intelligent choice, but that God reached down from heaven, changed my heart, plucked me from the gates of hell, and I was seated with him in his kingdom.

It went over me. If you lose that because of bondage and false teaching and people adding to the burden, that's spiritual depression, okay? Because remember, we're talking about spiritual depression, not clinical depression, all right?

And that's the connection here is, you know, soon as you start adding or taking away from the pure message, it's going to affect your demeanor and your spiritual condition one way or another. Does that answer your question?