Purchased and Set Free

August 3

”For there are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception who must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households by teaching things they ought not to teach—for the sake of dishonest gain…To the pure, all things are pure, but to those who are corrupted and do not believe, nothing is pure. In fact, both their minds and consciences are corrupted. They claim to know God, but by their actions they deny him. They are detestable, disobedient and unfit for doing anything good,” Titus 1:10, 15, 16.

Paul is emphatic—false teachers must be stopped! The Apostle is not speaking of violence here, rather, he is insisting that each believer be steeped in the knowledge of the truth so he will be able to refute the insidious seeds of corruption of the faith that these rebellious teachers sow among households who are not grounded in truth.

Those purveyors of falsehood are not among the pure, to whom all things are pure but instead disbelieve the truth they profess to share and allow their corrupted minds to twist and distort the truth of Christ into a detestable product of deception and darkness. Their intent is to scatter their evil seeds of demonic distortion in order to lure the unwary away from the truth that has the power to set them free.

The worst of these false teachers are among the congregation of the faithful. Upon first notice, they seem to blend in, they appear to be ardent students of the gospel of Christ and fervent sharers of the truth and its power. It is upon closer scrutiny that their duplicity becomes clear to those who know the truth and who have been set free by the truth.

But to the babes in Christ who are not anchored in the Word, their subtle distortions of the ministry of Christ to the lost becomes a path of deception that leads them away from the truth that sets men free into the quagmire of false doctrine that causes the unwary to be bound by lies to the doctrines of devils.

Besides false teachers in the congregation of the righteous, we also have persons of their ilk among people of prominence who impact our schools and social institutions and governmental agencies with their pseudo knowledge and scheming distortions that have the power to turn multitudes from pursuit of true faith to embrace of subtle deception.

May the Lord help us to extol the truth that makes us free, to expound the word that is forever “yea and amen in Christ,” II Corinthians 1:20, and to encourage others to anchor their lives for time and eternity to the only true and living God who has purchased us so He can set us free.