Five Questions That Expose a False Teacher

Start with the shortest test, because it eliminates the most people in the least time: what does this teacher say about Jesus Christ?

Not "do they mention Him." Everybody mentions Him. A ninety-second clip that autoplays after a worship video will mention Him twice. The question is what they say when they're forced to be specific. Is Jesus God in the flesh, fully divine and fully man? Did He die a real death for real sin and rise bodily? Is He the only way to the Father?

John writes it plainly: "By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God" (1 John 4:2). That's not a suggestion for seminary students. It's a household test, written to ordinary believers who were getting confused by teachers with better hair and more confidence than their pastor.

So listen for the dodge. A teacher who calls Jesus a pattern, an energy, the best version of ourselves, a moral example, a wayshower, "the Christ consciousness" — he's already failed, and nothing else he says needs weighing. Same for the warmer dodge, the one that shows up on talk shows: there are many paths, and Jesus is mine. Jesus closed that door Himself. "No one comes to the Father except through me" (John 14:6). Peter nailed it shut in Acts 4:12.

One question. Most of the counterfeits don't survive it.

Second question: what's the gospel here?

Paul was willing to lose friends over this one. "Even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). An angel. Paul's raising the stakes on purpose, because the danger isn't a guy in a robe screaming nonsense. The danger is a sincere, likable, apparently supernatural messenger with a gospel that's been shifted an inch.

The shift is almost always the same: something gets added to grace. Faith plus a rule. Faith plus a giving level. Faith plus a rediscovered secret that the institutional church has been sitting on. Or the opposite move, a gospel with the sin quietly removed, where nobody needs saving because nobody's actually guilty.

Ask it out loud after the sermon. According to that message, how is a sinner made right with God? If you can't answer from what you just heard, that's information.

Third question: are they handling the text or using it?

There's a difference between a man who opens Habakkuk and tells you what Habakkuk meant, and a man who opens Habakkuk, reads six words, and then talks about his business.

Watch for verses used as launchpads. Jeremiah 29:11 aimed at your job search. Philippians 4:13 aimed at a bench press. Isaiah 54:17 turned into a shield against your in-laws. The verses are real. The use isn't. When a passage gets pulled out of Babylon or a Roman prison and dropped into your Tuesday with no work done in between, you're not being taught, you're being sold something with a Bible sticker on it.

The Bereans get praised in Acts 17:11 for one behavior: they heard Paul, then they went home and checked, "examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so." Paul. They fact-checked Paul, and Luke calls them noble for it. Nobody standing in your pulpit outranks that.

Practically: keep your Bible open while you listen, and read the paragraph above and below whatever gets quoted. Ten seconds. It catches a shocking amount.

This is also why verse-by-verse preaching is worth finding. A man who has to preach the next paragraph next week can't only preach his hobbyhorses. Jack Hibbs and the Calvary Chapel churches have built decades on that model, and it's a good habit to want in whoever feeds you.

Fourth question: does this teacher ever tell you something you don't want to hear?

Paul warned Timothy about a season when "people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions" (2 Timothy 4:3). Notice who's driving. The crowd assembles the teachers. Demand comes first.

Jeremiah described the same racket in fewer words: "They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace" (Jeremiah 6:14).

So scroll back through a few months of a teacher's content. Is there ever a hard word? Repentance, self-denial, sexual purity, the cross, the judgment to come, taking up a cross daily? Or is it all affirmation, all destiny, all your best life? A shepherd who never says anything costly isn't protecting you from wolves. He's running a customer-satisfaction operation.

Opinion, and I'll own it as mine: the prosperity preachers fail this test on repeat. The health-and-wealth message reliably promises what Scripture never promises and quietly drops what Scripture insists on. Paul told Timothy about men who imagine "that godliness is a means of gain" (1 Timothy 6:5), and he wasn't paying them a compliment. That's a doctrinal charge, not an accusation of crimes. Argue the doctrine, and leave a man's character to God and to the people who actually know him.

Fifth question: who can tell them no?

Jesus gave the fruit test in Matthew 7:16, and Paul gave the job description in Titus 1:9 — an elder must "hold firm to the trustworthy word as taught," able to teach sound doctrine and correct those who contradict it. Both assume a teacher lives inside something. A church. Elders. People with the standing to pull him aside.

So ask the unglamorous questions. Is this person a member of a local church? Are there elders who could remove them? Is there a written statement of faith you can read, or just a vibe and a merch drop? Does the ministry exist downstream of a church, or is the church a stage the ministry rents?

Isolation isn't proof of guilt. But an unaccountable teacher with a large audience and no one who can say no is a structure built for failure, and it usually obliges.

Now the part that keeps you from becoming insufferable

Being wrong isn't the same as being false.

A brother who lands differently than you on the timing of the rapture, church government, worship style, spiritual gifts or how the days in Genesis 1 work isn't a wolf. He might be mistaken. You might be. Those conversations are worth having, sometimes for years, and they're not fought with the word heretic.

The tests above are aimed at a specific target: the person who denies who Jesus is, sells a different gospel, twists the text, refuses to name sin, or answers to nobody. Peter's language for them is brutal — they "secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them," and "in their greed they will exploit you with false words" (2 Peter 2:1,3). That's a category, not a synonym for people who annoy you.

And when you find one, you mostly don't need to fight. You need to leave, take your family and your giving with you, tell the friend who sent you the clip, and go sit under someone who opens the book and does the work.

The best protection you own isn't a rebuttal. It's familiarity. Read enough of the real thing and the counterfeit starts sounding wrong before you can explain why.