Discerning between a False and True Christianity is an article explaining how to discern between falsehood and true Christianity.

Start Off with the Basics

It is said that the US Treasury Department trains their personnel to identify false bills by studying meticulously true currency. I adamantly agree with that tactic in dealing with “religions.” There is no better defense that studying intensively the true Christianity as presented to us in the Bible.

How to Identify a False Religion

Let me begin by stating a simple fact. There are two issues we are dealing with here.

1.) People (ministers) who change the Bible’s doctrine with some other teaching.

2) People (laymen and ministers) who are hypocrites and do not conduct themselves as the Bible directs us to do.

Both groups are deadly if you follow them. Even having hypocrites in your church is dangerous because we are like putty. What we experience we often copy eventually. We have to denounce and oppose false lifestyles as well as false doctrine.

Principle: Doctrine produces conduct corresponding to the same quality as the doctrine is.

False doctrine produces hypocrites and sin as well as excuse of sins.

True doctrine produces Christlikeness.

If you constantly study Jesus Christ and God in the Bible, you well get the overall picture of how their character is, and you can easily distinguish between people who claim to be Christians but are not like God and Christ.

Always keep it together

You always have to insist that biblical character has to be present when you are trying to assign biblical doctrine. We are all sinners, but God uses ministers that have a good testimony in true Christianity. Those who supposedly have good doctrine but are fornicators, liars, covetous, etc. are only hypocrites, and you do yourself no good by fellow-shipping with them or giving to them.

Good conduct always is a precursor to good doctrine.

It gets almost comical to hear people excuse their own horribly sinful life as not bearing on their doctrine. A pastor justifies his romantic extra-marital affairs saying that they do not bear on his ministry because he has “good doctrine.” But look into the Bible in 1 Timothy 3 and Titus 1, and you find that God requires a good testimony before a man can on a ministry for God. This is a key factor in determining true Christianity from a false religion.

True Christianity lives the Word of God

The most essential key to understanding good from bad, true from false, is to understand and believe that God has faithfully communicated to us. He has done this via the Holy Scriptures. They lay the foundation from which nothing can be authoritative with abiding in these Scriptures.

Secondly, God has given every believe the Holy Spirit to work with the Scripture and with each person’s conscience.

If you examine false religion, false cults, you will find things that just do not fit at all with the Holy Scriptures. David Koresh of the Branch Davidians taught his group that he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Therefore according to his teaching, every woman in his group had to experience full joy, which was a keyword for sexual intercourse.

Okay, the first thing wrong here is that Jesus Christ never frequented women in a sexual way. So how did that fit with Koresh? Isn’t it just obvious that Koresh wanted easy sex and didn’t want to pay for it? Secondly, reincarnation is more of an eastern religion and not Christianity. Nowhere in Scripture is that seen or taught.

Moreover, if those things didn’t send off alarms in your head, there is the simple little thing of being unfaithfully sexually to your husband. Shouldn’t these women have complained saying “the emperor has no clothes” and say Koresh is not biblical? Their conscience should have kicked in because fornication and adultery is condemned, and God would not do that to people.

But there are disconnects between the norms and standards the Bible teaches and the teaching and practice of a false religion. Even in a good case of a biblical ministry, a pastor can have illicit sexual relations with one of the women that is not his lawful wife. But then we get into talking about the same thing. Bad religion. Maybe what they teach publicly IS BIBLICAL, but they don’t uphold the testimony part of the deal. They are poison just the same.

Discerning between a False and True Christianity