A Brief State­ment of Purpose

The great­est dan­ger fac­ing Chris­tians does not come from pub­lic edu­ca­tion, the king­dom of the cults, or world reli­gions. To put it another way, the great­est dan­ger does not come from sci­en­tists, Chris­t­ian Sci­en­tists, or Scientologists.

It comes from within the church!

What is this dan­ger? It is the sup­plant­ing of the cen­tral­ity of the Lord Jesus Christ and the pri­macy of the Word of God in wor­ship. Rather than go to the Lord and His Word, the tra­di­tions of men are brought into the churches, taught as dogma, and forced into the Word of God as if it should have been there to begin with.

These com­mand­ments and doc­trines of men sound like this, “Do not touch, do not taste, do not handle,”:”(Colossians 2:21.)”: but such reg­u­la­tions have only the appear­ance of wis­dom. Think about that for a moment. That means that these false teach­ings will seem like bib­li­cal teach­ing, but the resem­blance is only sur­face level. This “wis­dom” will find its strength in self-​imposed reli­gion, false humil­ity, and neglect of the body,:”(Colossians 2:23.)”: but it in no way is glo­ry­ing to Christ.

In Paul’s day, the prob­lems included such things as the for­bid­ding of mar­riage and absti­nence from meats;:”(1 Tim­o­thy 4:3.)”: the peo­ple teach­ing these things — which Paul describes as “doc­trines of devils”:”(1 Tim­o­thy 4:1.)”: — likely were using pas­sages from the Old Tes­ta­ment to add sub­stance to their man-​made reli­gion. This same kind of thing is still trip­ping of Chris­tians today; a notable dif­fer­ence is that now peo­ple have twenty-​seven more books of the Bible:”(The New Tes­ta­ment.)”: to mis­use in sup­port of their own agendas.

We cer­tainly have such issues today; for example:

• The King-​James-​Only Move­ment, which pro­motes the King James Ver­sion as the only godly trans­la­tion of the Bible in the Eng­lish lan­guage. That this is a man-​made doc­trine is evi­dent in the fact that it would have been impos­si­ble to main­tain in, say, the year 1610. There are numer­ous argu­ments that adher­ents to this move­ment use and I believe Chris­tians ought to be aware of them and how to reply to them biblically.
• The oppo­nents of Con­tem­po­rary Chris­t­ian Music, Chris­t­ian rock, or other forms of non-​traditional Chris­t­ian music would have Chris­tians to believe that cer­tain styles of music are inher­ently sin­ful and that adding Chris­t­ian lyrics to these styles is blas­phemy against God. Chris­tians should be aware of their rea­son­ings and know how to refute them scripturally.
• Believ­ers in the­is­tic evo­lu­tion, the Gap The­ory, and other such vari­a­tions on the actual words of Gen­e­sis assume and teach that based upon what sci­ence claims we are able to arbi­trar­ily cre­ate divi­sions in Gen­e­sis, denot­ing some chap­ters to be fig­u­ra­tive while oth­ers are lit­eral. Such an approach cer­tainly has the appear­ance of wis­dom, but it destroys the integrity and foun­da­tion of the entire Word of God. As with the pre­vi­ous two exam­ples, some­thing other than the Word of God is made an author­ity, and so it is impor­tant for Chris­tians to know how to counter adher­ents to com­pro­mised teach­ings regard­ing Genesis.

Such issues per­me­ate fun­da­men­tal churches, though I’m cer­tainly not try­ing to “attack” such churches. I count myself a fun­da­men­tal­ist in many ways. How­ever, these teach­ings like all oth­ers are sub­ject to testing.:”(1 Thes­sa­lo­ni­ans 5:21.)”: This means that As the Bere­ans did,:”(Acts 17:10,11.)”: so must we Chris­tians of today do.

Timothy’s Bur­den is all about stay­ing true to the doc­trine com­mit­ted to us in the Bible. In a world where peo­ple are seek­ing teach­ers who will ful­fill their own desires (for tra­di­tion, for glory, and so on), it is vitally impor­tant to remem­ber the thrust of Paul’s advice:”(2 Tim­o­thy 4:2.)”: to Tim­o­thy con­cern­ing such a situation:

Preach the Word!