Devotion for January 22, 2014

Warning- very male illustration ahead.

Imagine walking through an incredibly humid jungle in the middle of war torn Vietnam. Your a soldier in a platoon working your way through the underbrush to meet up with another unit in a short period of time. You look behind you to see if your fellow soldier has your back and you realize that he is gone. He left! He abandoned you. Now you are exposed and unprotected. This is a picture of the word “removed” in our text for today.

I marvel that ye are so soon removed from him that called you into the grace of Christ unto another gospel:

Paul expresses amazement at how far from the gospel they had gotten and how quickly it happened. They abandoned “him that called you into the grace of Christ”. They left. They abandoned the Lord, Paul and the gospel itself. Where did they go? What distracted them?

Which is not another; but there be some that trouble you, and would pervert the gospel of Christ. (Galatians 1:6, 7)

False teaching and false teachers had drawn them away from the gospel that they had received. Notice that Paul says that this was on purpose. There were people who were trying to do this for multiple reasons.

False teachers and false teaching is not a new problem. Unbiblical preaching and teaching are easily found today. We have access to so much teaching on the Bible, and Paul gives us this warning- there are some who will teach the wrong thing for their own personal reasons.

Tomorrow we’ll be looking at how we respond to people who preach “another gospel” to us.

But for today think about this…

You and I have a responsibility to discern what we are being taught by the Truth of God’s Word.

This isn’t just true when someone is preaching or teaching. This is true of the “sermons” that we hear all the time from ourselves, tv, radio, blogs, podcasts, commercials, billboards, friends and family. And this is especially true when the teaching is dealing with the gospel itself.

Where are some of the places you hear these “sermons”?