We are used to seeing animals come onto our property. We have a large yard and a pasture where we used to keep cattle. We normally see cats, dogs, squirrels and rabbits. We have a family of groundhogs living in our barn. A time or two we have seen a deer bouncing through our pasture. One time we saw a bear come up through our pasture, climb through the fence and pass our house. The other day there was a totally white cat which we had never seen before sitting near our birdfeeder. It was intensely watching for a bird to come by. A few minutes later we saw it move a tiny bit like it might be getting ready to attack something. Suddenly it floated in the air, flipped a time or two and stuck to some plants along our fence row. It was not a cat at all but a white plastic bag!
There is an old adage that goes like this: “Do not believe anything you see and only half of what you hear.” I’m sorry to say that this is true in the religious world also.
Jude 4 (ISV) “For some people have slipped in among you unnoticed. They were written about long ago as being deserving of this condemnation because they are ungodly. They turn the grace of our God into uncontrollable lust and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Jude 12-13 (ISV) “These people are stains on your love feasts. They feast with you without any sense of awe. They are shepherds who care only for themselves. They are waterless clouds blown about by the winds. They are autumn trees that are fruitless, twice dead, and uprooted. They are wild waves of the sea, churning up the foam of their own shame. They are wandering stars for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever.”
We need to make sure that the people we listen to are telling us the truth of God. We need to do what the Bereans did when Paul and Silas went to visit them:
Acts 17:11 (ISV) “These people were more receptive than those in Thessalonica. They were very willing to receive the message, and every day they carefully examined the Scriptures to see if those things were so.”
We also need to do what the apostle John tells us to do in his first epistle:
1 John 4:1-3 (ISV) “Dear friends, stop believing every spirit. Instead, test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. This is how you can recognize God’s Spirit: Every spirit who acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. But every spirit who does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist. You have heard that he is coming, and now he is already in the world.”
So don’t take everything you see and hear at face value. Check it out for yourself. What you think is a white cat may just be a white plastic bag.
By Dean W. Masters
Unedited redistribution approved