“These people are blemishes at your love
feasts, eating with you without the slightest qualm -- shepherds who feed only
themselves. They are clouds without rain, blown along by the wind; autumn
trees, without fruit and uprooted -- twice dead.” (Jude 12 NIV)
Godless men had slipped into the church,
misleading the [congregation], seducing them to believe they could continue to
sin and never receive God’s correction. Jude called these false teachers “shepherds
who feed only themselves.”
Can you imagine a shepherd sitting on a
barren hill, hungry animals all around him, enjoying his lunch? The baas and
bleating would be almost deafening. He’d have to care for them.
Unlike sheep, people who fall in with
wrong teaching rarely recognize the emptiness of what they’re taking in.
Instead, they keep following, filling their hearts with useless calories of spiritual
junk food, never understanding that they’re barely being fed after all.
Don’t follow these teachers. They’re here
today, gone tomorrow. Nothing they do can last, because they aren’t founded on
the bedrock of God’s Word.
-- Toni Sortor and Pamela McQuade in “God’s
Word for Surviving the Real World”
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