Consider the Source! It’s a Matter of Life and Death

DEBORAH PRATT | Life Assurance Ministries’ Online Moderator

I’m sure you have had the experience, if you are a YouTube user, of seeing all manner of videos “popping up” in your YouTube feed. Many times, videos by people I have never watched are interspersed with videos whose channels I follow, probably because of some YouTube algorithm designed to get other channels more exposure.  

How do you decide what to watch? For that matter, how do you decide what to read or listen to? If you decide to watch, read, or listen to something, what do you do with what you have seen or heard? How easily do you accept what you watch, read, or hear, at face value? How easily do you just assume the person, book, or video telling you something has the credentials or authority to know what they are talking about, has the facts, and is not spinning what they are telling you from dishonest motivation or misplaced self-importance? 

When I was a child and came home from school or playing and had stories about something unkind someone said to me, my mother would say, “Consider the source.” I needed to learn to differentiate between the school bully’s snide remarks and the helpful advice of a teacher or friend who had my best interests at heart, to determine whether I allowed those words to have permission to stay with me. 

Beguiled By Comfort

This advice especially applies to our spiritual consumption of what the world around us is constantly throwing in front of us, particularly with AI being incorporated into so much of our media content. And it is spiritual life or death when we are newly out of a cult or false doctrine. “Consider the source” was personally crucial to me in examining Adventism while I was building friendships with a local group of Adventist folks after a very disequilibrating event in my life.

I first began seeking out former Adventists when I was invited by a good friend, who is at least second generation Adventist if not third, to a local “non-traditional” Saturday church (read Adventist); my only child had just passed away, and my friend said that it would be a healing place to be. I knew little about the actual teachings of Adventism, but I certainly needed a healing place to be—and people to be with—so I joined her and met a lovely group of people who were warm and welcoming. They are my friends to this day.

At the same time, I knew that I did not know what they taught and believed, so I began hunting for information online about Adventist doctrine and practice. I had a deep sense of being guarded about what I would hear in the Saturday church setting, and I didn’t want to fall for doctrinal error just because the people were kind and welcoming. I expected attempts to deceive me spiritually. Most likely these attempts would come from well-meaning Adventists who were unaware of their cognitively dissonant worldview, but I needed to pay attention carefully.  

Eventually, I found the Former Adventist Fellowship forum, which I joined, and I eagerly watched the Former Adventist Fellowship annual conference videos from beginning to end. I was startled at how little I knew my own Bible, how massive the doctrinal problems were in Adventism, how spiritually dark it is, and how easily I could be misled because of the increasingly sly vocabulary used to refer to faith concepts understood differently by born-again followers of Christ.

While I was not a former Adventist, I was remarkably ignorant about the Bible. I had sporadically done in-depth Bible study, but nothing sustained. And I did unfortunately spend some years in New Age and mysticism after being introduced to some of its activities through a local retreat facility whose owner was…Adventist, and in fact was a charter member (but no longer attending) of the “non-traditional” church I now attended with friends. 

…while I did not have identical deceptions to root out and replace with solid doctrine, Formers and I did have much in common in the hunger for the meat of the Word and the joy of finding the Truth.

So, while I did not have identical deceptions to root out and replace with solid doctrine, Formers and I did have much in common in the hunger for the meat of the Word and the joy of finding the Truth. And I found myself wanting to understand the Adventist worldview from the perspective of people rebuilding a true faith. There is so much to learn, but I found kindred souls in the cautious approach to the increasing barrage of false teaching and the persistent weeding-out that needed to be done as we studied God’s Word. 

Discernment Not Optional

As believers, we must expect attempts to deceive us, and stay alert, even in our churches. The stakes are eternal. We must be like the Bereans in Acts 17:11 when Paul and Silas went to the synagogue of the Jews in Berea: “Now these were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so” (emphasis mine). 

So, how do we do that? 

First, we make the Bible preeminent in our time and in our evaluations of other content. This means having a good translation and measuring everything against it. It also means letting Scripture interpret Scripture, preferably using the inductive method because it anchors us in all parts of the Bible. Also, use reference tools such as Bible dictionaries and concordances as needed, have one or two trustworthy pastors or teachers you can discuss with, and only resort to commentaries as a last resource, choosing the author(s) carefully. It also means identifying what you are studying as a primary, secondary, or lower-level concept; many voices these days don’t get the primary things straight and just want to argue over the secondary and lower-level things—a breeding ground for confusion for people just trying to get the main things straight.

Second, if you have not had a sufficient amount of time—two years of intensive study is a good start—rebuilding a true Biblical understanding of the Word, try to avoid the random pop-ups in your media feeds or reading/watching just anything or everything that comes along on Facebook; it is so very easy to get distracted by garbage content made by content creators whose main goal is to get clicks and stir up conflict, confusion, or fear. Know your foundations, what you believe, and why from the Bible. 

Without a firm foundation, it is easy to get rattled by what you hear or read; prolonged, deep study inoculates you against deceptive practices—you can spot the lies much more effectively.  Stick with content creators you know will not mislead you. Hebrews 5:13-14 (NASB) tells us,

 “For everyone who partakes only of milk is not accustomed to the word of righteousness, for he is an infant. But solid food is for the mature, who because of practice have their senses trained to discern good and evil.” (Emphasis mine.) 

The longer you know what the real looks like, the easier it is to spot the lies. Building a habit of regular, in-depth Bible study is priceless.

Third, if you really want to look at something by an unknown creator or author, first do your homework with a healthy dose of skepticism. Look at the home page of the channel; try to find out who owns the content. If there is a webpage in the show notes, go look at it. If there is no bio in YouTube and no webpage with further information, you have no measure by which you can decide whether the content creator is even a human being.  

Find the “About” link and look at the content creator’s bio, if one is given (if there isn’t one, that’s a flag). Look at statements of faith, if provided (even if they are solid, the content continues to need to be evaluated). Look at their affiliations (the old saying “birds of a feather” applies here). Doing all this will give you a sense of the agendas the content creator will probably bring to the content. If you must dig through multiple links and levels to find a creator’s or publisher’s identity, that is also a big flag. Sometimes it takes many links to finally get to a page that identifies a source; sometimes, a source is never identifiable. If that’s the case, you’re best off to leave it alone. The same applies to authors of books. Transparency is critical to trust.

GLOW In My Groceries

A simple example of this process is when I emptied my grocery delivery bags one day and found a GLOW tract on a health topic in one of them. I looked on the back of the tract to see what organization it was from—no information. That was the first flag; they want me invested in the idea before they tell me who they are. I immediately did not trust the source—I knew there was a deceptive agenda. So, I went online and searched “GLOW tracts.” Nowhere on most of the menu pages was any identifying clue about where these come from, except one tract referring to “Why We Worship on Saturday” (that narrowed it down a bit) and another page with an image link to Voice of Prophecy. I was getting warmer, but if someone did not know what Voice of Prophecy is, they would still not have sufficient source information. Not until the donation page did it identify an Adventist Conference link. 

There is a grand difference between being caught up in the strange, mystical, or bizarre, and listening to someone talk about their rescue from such things by God’s saving grace. It matters to know the difference.

Why don’t we always “do the homework” before we partake?  The same things override our caution in spiritual things as in scams in general—appeal to urgency, lack of information transparency, appeal to the culture, appeal to emotions, potential entertainment value, fraudulent association with a trustworthy organization, joining in on a fad or a hot trend (who doesn’t want to be healthy??), financial gain, or attraction to the strange, legendary, fantastical, “magical,” mystical, or bizarre. It pays to be able to assess what is in front of you for these kinds of deceptions. There is a grand difference between being caught up in the strange, mystical, or bizarre, and listening to someone talk about their rescue from such things by God’s saving grace. It matters to know the difference.

Another critical element of subtle deception that requires thoughtful consideration is the calculated use of the language. The culture inside and outside of the church breeds terms with loaded and multiple meanings. When people throw the word “inclusive” around, what do they mean? What is their context? What do you know about the values the speaker holds? Those values shape the agenda at hand.

Identifying False Teachers

Who is Jesus to the Mormons? Do we just take someone else’s words at face value or assume they mean what we think they mean? Or do we look more closely at the speaker and the context of the use of the word in the setting in which we are hearing or watching? Do we then compare that meaning found in the other context to what the Bible has to say about it? 

The New Testament alone mentions at least sixty warnings to believers about false teachers, false teaching, and deceptions that will not only come from outside the body of Christ but from inside as well. (Do we truly grasp how important it is to guard our hearts and stay on the narrow path [Proverbs 4:20-27 NASB])?  

Sometimes the cultural creep starts the apostasy rolling. I have heard many stories recently about churches that have gone along generally seeming quite solid, and then a study leader, who may or may not have to run the option past the lead shepherd of the flock, offers to teach a class about the enneagram, for example. This is one of the hot trends in some evangelical churches at present (this was part of the New Age rubbish I was caught up in years ago). 

The enneagram sounds exciting and mysterious, and it promises to reveal special knowledge about one’s personality and gifts. The problem is that it is a fraud; the background, premises, and current promotors of this “system of personality assessment” are all counter-Biblical^*. They are false teaching, designed to tickle ears who want to hear something new or different. If pursuing this does nothing else, it calls God a liar since the system and God’s word cannot both be true. If one accepts the truth of the enneagram system, one is calling God a liar; yet there is massive push-back by those who have become enamored of it and pastors who will not tolerate being questioned. 

Peter wrapped up his first epistle to the ones chosen by God “who reside as aliens, scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia” by his reminder in chapter 5:8: 

“Be of sober spirit, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.” (NASB)

As God’s chosen children, we cannot afford to play fast and loose with what tempts us through deceit and subterfuge, but that means we have to do our Berean homework—to know God’s breathed-out Word to us well enough to spot the lies and stay rooted in the truth, and consider our sources.†

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*https://biblicalcounseling.com/resource-library/podcast-episodes/the-origins-of-the-enneagram/?srsltid=AfmBOoqrq6x90zfWkTFEuyk_bpdmmPW202b_WKb46H4h-N7bFOtxGnjz

NASB: New American Standard Bible: 1995 Update (La Habra, CA: The Lockman Foundation, 1995).