This life isn’t a game show

By Pastor Ken Staley

Back in the day there were game shows on TV that entertained with deception.

“To Tell the Truth” was one of those shows. Three people stood in the shadows and announced that they were all Jim Bob Smith or whoever, and the contestants listened to their story and had to guess who the real Jim Bob was.

Another show I really like was “Liars Club.” Three celebrities were handed a weird looking object and only one of them knew what the purpose of it was. The other two had to make up some story on the fly to try and fool the contestants.

Innocent fun, right?

The Bible speaks about deception in the last days, but it’s no game show, it’s serious stuff. The apostle John wrote in his letters to the church, “Many deceivers have gone out into the world; they do not confess the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.”

The apostle Paul said the same thing to the Ephesians, “Don’t be naive, tossed here and there by every wind of doctrine and fall for the trickery of deceiving schemers.”

The primary goal of deceivers is to get Christians away from the Bible and adopt an open-minded tolerance of the new morality and new revelations that go beyond the Bible. Paul rebuked the Corinthians by saying, “You’re very willing to accept a message that is different than the one that you received from us, you tolerate that very well!”

Tolerance is now the altar that pop culture demands everyone bow to. This is why John wrote, “Anyone who does not remain in Christ’s teaching but goes beyond it does not have God. The one who remains in Christ’s teaching has both the Father and the Son.” These scriptures that warn of last-day deception were written nearly 2,000 years ago. Now, if it was the “Last Days” 2,000 years ago, the days we are living in deserve even more sober attention. The Holy Spirit through Paul warned the Ephesian elders and us, “Savage wolves will come around, not sparing the flock. Men will rise up from your own churches and distort the truth to lure followers of Jesus to follow them, so be on guard.” We must not allow our walk with the Father, with Jesus, and with the Holy Spirit to be hijacked by the current trend of false teaching that preaches a relaxed morality and a deity that holds no one to account. Satan is out to deceive, and we are not on a game show. Faith Church of Pleasant Grove at 9:30 a.m. and Harrisville Methodist at 11 a.m.