When we read the Bible’s warnings about false teachers, we have a tendency to breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that we’re so glad we aren’t caught up in a church that promotes things about the gospel that are untrue. We think about how wonderful it is not to be gripped by prosperity teaching or by some cultish doctrine that might lead us away from the truth of Scripture.
We may walk around feeling like we can mark ourselves safe from false teaching, since we don’t plan to step into a church where we know the false teachers are at work. But I would submit to you that it is easier now than ever to stumble upon teaching that is almost right, so close to true, but is actually an absolute lie. This is because all of us carry phones in our pockets, and it’s likely that most of us are engaging with social media.
Social media has to be one of the greatest tools of the enemy for planting false teaching into the minds of Jesus’ followers. I think it’s completely possible that people of God who know good doctrine, who understand what is orthodox and what isn’t, can recognize the majority of the religious talk that is untrue. But every single one of us, from pastor to new convert, is vulnerable to adopting a worldview that is self-centered, even self-obsessed, when we spend time on any of the social media platforms.
Many of us spend wild amounts of time watching short videos on these platforms where we are told to put ourselves first, to look around and recognize how many narcissists are in our lives, to analyze every relationship we have, to be suspicious of the people who love us. They try to diagnose all of the things that are making us unhappy, and they even urge us to realize that we are actually unhappy and just don’t realize it yet.
For women, social media is a minefield of resentment. It trains us to think about how put upon we are as mothers and wives. It defines motherhood in ways that make us feel like martyrs. And it paints a picture of womanhood that causes us to grumble, to see our families as hardships, to see service to the world around us as a burden. The world should be serving us. It should be obsessed with us. It should treat us like queens, and on and on and on.
The sneakiest false teaching out there is the false teaching that doesn’t identify itself as religious. It’s just thoughts. It’s just experiences. It’s just what someone learned in therapy. And so we take in the teaching, we chew it up and we swallow it, and then as it digests, it begins to change the way we feel. Over time it begins to color our attitude about the things God has called us to do. It begins to cause us to believe that we deserve more. One day we look up from our phones and realize that we have a lot of incredibly unbiblical ideas about how we fit into this world, and not a single thought came from a person who claimed to be offering religious instruction.
There’s a reason that the apostle Peter warns Christians to be alert and sober-minded. (1 Peter 5:8-9) It wasn’t just a message for those poor first century Christians who were dealing with so many false teachers in their midst. It wasn’t just for the poor Christians today who are being deceived by church leaders with bad doctrine. It’s a very real warning for you and me.
Have you ever lost track of time on social media? I’ll bet you have. You have probably found yourself lulled into a time warp, watching reel after reel, swallowing down everything that the world wants to feed you, until you are completely drunk on bad thinking that is directly opposed to the biblical worldview. Could there be a clearer picture of one who is no longer alert? One who has forgotten how to think clearly? Most of us have been there.
So many of the things we see seem good. They sound basically right. They appeal to us. You could almost say that they tickle our ears. (2 Timothy 4:3) The apostles saw this coming. They warned that false teaching would be a problem.
How cunning of Satan to make us feel like we don’t have any issues with false teachers.
Be sober-minded. Be alert. There are false teachers in your pocket.
