Deception In the Church

As I posted a while back, when I come across false teaching, I am going to post it here.

My Sunday School class uses LifeWay materials. Some are very good and some are very bad. One study called, The Love Languages of God by Gary Chapman is false teaching. Mr. Chapman has basically taken his book, The Five Love Languages which was a huge success, and wrote another one using this premise about our Holy Father.

One gets the impression that some of these authors take a wrong premise and then use a verse here and there to design a Bible study promoting their new book. My first impression of this study was to think: Wasn't God's love language at the cross? What more do we need?

But, silly me. Once again, we have a man centered Bible study that puts us at the forefront. Me. Me. Me. According to this study, it seems that God knows our love language and communicates to us using this love language. This is pure bunk, folks. He communicates to us through the Holy Scriptures.

Just to give you a synopsis of this study: The Love Languages are Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Gifts, Acts of Service and Physical Touch. Mr. Chapman claims that his premise is the love languages observed in human relationships are a reflection of divine love. (He did not capitalize Divine) Mr. Chapman claims that since we are made in the image of God then we can expect to find all five love languages expressed in the nature and character of God.

Let me give you just one example of Mr. Chapman's teaching. In the chapter on quality time, Chapman relates a story about a husband and wife and their differing approaches to becoming a Christian. Seems that the wife came to Faith after months of contemplation, prayer and reading scripture. She did not get emotional or cry. She described it as a 'quiet, calm moment in which my heart opened up and I 'allowed' God to come into my life'. (Emphasis mine)

First of all, we do not 'allow' God to come into our life. This is once again, man centered. None of us seek God. See Romans 3.

On the other hand, her husband came to Faith when visiting a church service with a co-worker. The co-worker asked him to come down front so that they could pray over him. Within five minutes he was weeping uncontrollably and asking God to forgive him.

The wife continues, "God spoke my husband's primary love language, physical touch, and my primary love language, quality time, and led both of us to understand He loved us."

"I realized that not only does God speak our primary love language to show His love to us, but we speak our primary love language to show our love to God. My husband expresses his love to God by singing praise songs in church. He will lift both hands toward God, often close his eyes, and sing with all his heart. I sometimes see tears running from his eyes as he sings. His emotions are stirred. I would never do that, it is just not me."

As the wife continues to speak see if you can catch the really subtle false teaching: "My greatest joy is spending time with God in studying scriptures. Nothing is more important to me than my time with God. On the other hand, my husband finds it hard to spend more than 10 minutes reading the Bible or a devotional book. I realize now that he is as sincere as I. It's just that we speak different love languages to God."

Folks, did you catch it? It all sounds so nice and wonderful but this teaching is a lie from the pit of hell.

First of all, his conversion was an emotional experience. Does that negate it? No, but we find out he does not particularly like to read scripture for more than 10 mintues at a time. What is he using to test his emotions? We only have one thing: SCRIPTURE. We know the heart is deceitful and we cannot trust our emotions. We must test everything by scripture. And if his wife is teaching him scripture that he does not like to read himself, we have another whole new problem.

This is only one thing out of the entire Bible Study but you get the idea. Mr. Chapman is teaching us that it is ok to use emotions without testing them by scripture. This is extremely dangerous. There is no other way for us to know if it is the Holy Spirit working in us but through prayerfully studying the scriptures.

I could go on with other false teaching in this study but will stop. We are bringing so much of this easy man centered teaching into the church that it is scary. We should be frightened. God is so Holy, so Sovereign we cannot reduce Him to a silly man centered concept of love languages.

If you want a Biblical hint about God using love languages: Old Testament Prophets fell on their faces when they had an encounter with the Holy God. I guess one could call that, physical touch.