By Pastor Rasheed Z. Baaith
“For every man shall bear his own burden.” (Galatians 6:5 – KJV)
This present time we live in is without doubt a time of great turmoil and confusion in the Houses of God that profess following the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is a time in which Pastors who appear to have a great anointing and are highly gifted are preaching the opposite of what the Word of God reads. Far too many of them have become apostate in their teachings.
Some of them seem to have done great things for God and have preached the Gospel effectively but now have decided their love for popularity is greater than their love for God. As a result many believers are being led away from the true faith and are beginning to compromise the Gospel as taught by Jesus Christ and the Apostles. That faith that the Book of Jude tells us we “should earnestly contend for.”
What that sentence means is each of us who profess Jesus Christ as our LORD and Savior has a responsibility to know what we believe and why we believe what we do. We have a responsibility to understand both our theology and our doctrine. Our theology is what we believe about God and doctrine is why we believe it.
It is for this reason we are instructed to “study to show thyself approved,” in 2 Timothy 2:15. We need to under-stand and live the fact that if what some Pastor tells us cannot be found in the Bible, we are to dismiss what they have said.
The Bible is not for personal interpretation or selective acceptance. The Bible, like the Constitution of this country, is a living document. And it lives because it is the breath of God. It is complete because God is complete, it is perfect because God is perfect and it is holy because God is holy.
That means no preacher, teacher or minister is to preach unbiblical teaching, no matter how popular, how politically correct and how socially pressured are to do so it may be. Nor is any believer to accept such teachings.
But you cannot question what you are unfamiliar with or do not know. Today’s believers have put the onus of what they are supposed to know and live as Christians everywhere but them-selves. Not one of us is compelled to sit and listen to anyone. And if we are doing so out of ignorance because we are too lazy to study, we can only blame ourselves for the compromised word we are accepting.
No doubt God will call us to an accounting of what we accepted as truth when it was unsound doctrine that “changed the truth of God into a lie.” It will not matter how charismatic your pastor is or how often he is on television, how long your family has been at a particular church or how large the church membership is.
All that will matter is in God’s Eyes you did not study as you should and know what you should have known. That fault will be no ones but your own.
Finally, there is this: there was a time in our community when even those who did not regularly attend church had more than a passing awareness of Bible Scripture. That was because our community attended church, taught the Bible in the home and understood the power of prayer.
Now our community has whole generations who are unchurched. Like so much that is wrong in our community, the problem and the correction can be found in our family life.
“And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and then thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.” (Deuteronomy 11:19 KJV)
