Watchout For WOLVES: Keys To Discerning Authentic Ministries & Evaluating Doctrinal Trends

New converts are the immature in relationship to their faith and they know very little Scripture. In addition, they do not have a lot of experience with listening to the voice of God through an ongoing relationship with the Holy Spirit and the word of God. As a result, they do not yet know how to distinguish the voices of true and false shepherds. The more of a novice that someone is, the more susceptible they are to the pitfalls of the devil (1 Tim. 3:6). Secondly , false ministries prey on the weak, immature and ungrounded (2 Pet. 2:14; 3:16). Peter speaks of these false teachers who bring in destructive heresies and who exploit people with deceptive words. In 2 Peter 2:13-15 he says, They are spots and blemishes, carousing in their own deceptions while they feast with you, 14 having eyes full of adultery and that cannot cease from sin, enticing unstable souls . They have a heart trained in covetous practices, and are accursed children. 15 They have forsaken the right way and gone astray, following the way of Balaam the son of Beor, who loved the wages of unrighteousness… 2 Peter 2:13b-15 Verse 14 refers to the enticing, luring or seducing of “unstable souls.” The word for “unstable” in the Greek means “unstable, vacillating or unfixed.” These are people who are not fixed or established in their understanding or grounded enough in the word of God to be able to know the difference between truth and error. And so, dear friends, while you are waiting for these things to happen, make every effort to live a pure and blameless life. And be at peace with God. And remember, the Lord is waiting so that people have time to be saved. This is just as our beloved brother Paul wrote to you with the wisdom God gave him-- speaking of these things in all of his letters. Some of his comments are hard to understand, and those who are ignorant and unstable have twisted his letters around to mean something quite different from what

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