ANTICHRIST (8) | PREACHING SHOULD BE ACCORDING TO GOD'S SPIRIT

1. Preaching Should Be According To God’s Spirit

a) Our confidence should be in those who preach the word of God in sharpness, clarity, and power. Those who walk openly in the light, whose lives can bear the spotlight of the spirit of truth. Their speaking leads the hearer to a life in Christ. A life of keeping His commandments and walking as He walked. This is the opposite of what the spirit of the Antichrist is accomplishing through leaders who, through their hypocrisy and perversion of the word of God, cannot lead anyone to anything more than forgiveness of sins and good feelings.

b) “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God.” (1 John 4:1)

c) Yet people love to hear these words because it means that they don’t have to use the cross in their own life – it takes away the need for action, suffering, and coming out of sin. This is why people who preach in this Antichrist spirit draw such large crowds with their grandeur and beautiful, empty words. They give people exactly what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. And then Satan is satisfied, because he has people right where he wants them – miles away from the truth of the gospel of victory over sin.

d) And so people would rather continue in their blindness and ignore the truth. Because then they can live their comfortable lives, secure in their belief that Jesus did everything and they have to do nothing. Those who should be their teachers and instructors in Christ have been possessed by this Antichrist spirit, and so the majority of the religious world continues in darkness and ignorance.

e) Few are they who preach the word of truth! Few are they who seek the truth and have their eyes open to the deception of an outward show with no life of Christ behind it.