One of Jesus’ most frightening warnings

One of the scariest passages in scripture is the portion in Matthew 7:21–23. Jesus is talking about walking the straight and narrow path and carefully examining the fruit of those teaching you.

How straight and narrow? Have you ever really thought and prayed about how straight and narrow the path really is?

In verse 21, Jesus begins by talking about the need to obey what he has said.

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord…’ will enter the Kingdom of Heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven.”

The will of the Father

Most of our walk has to do with determining the will of God so we can obey. Many of these things can be determined by even a cursory read of the New Testament. We see the core of it in John 6:40

My Father’s will is that all who see his Son and believe in him will have eternal life. {Jesus} will raise them up at the last day.

So the first major thing is to believe in Jesus: that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died on the cross so that you could be forgiven, and that He rose from the dead. We see the next portion in John 15.

If you abide in me, and I live in you, then you will be very fruitful. [John 15:5]

So we must not only believe but we must live within Him and He in us. Jesus continues in verse ten…

If you keep my commandments, you will abide…

He then gives the next major portion of doing the will of the Father in verse twelve.

This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.

We must keep His commandments and love one another… Obviously there is much more than this and a whole book could be written [and many have] about how to do the will of God.

Then He goes after powerful ministers

Back to Matthew 7:21–23—in Verse 22 he is obviously talking about people in the Church. Those who prophesy, cast out demons, and do mighty works in the name of Jesus.

“Many will say to me when that day comes, ‘Lord, Lord, haven’t we prophesied in your name, cast out demons in your name, and done miracles in your name?’”

Gifts of the Spirit

These people are obviously used to using the supernatural gifts given to believers as listed in I Corinthians 12:

Wisdom	Knowledge	Faith
Healing	Miracles	Prophecy
Discernment	Tongues	Interpretation of tongues

In our day, the church in the new millennium, this would be a pretty radical Christian. Imagine such a person in your church (whether it is Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, mainline, evangelical, Pentecostal, charismatic, post-modern, or non-denominational). A person doing this type of thing regularly would be seen as a strong person of God, filled with the Spirit. Such a ministry could be large and growing fast. It could quickly have a huge audience worldwide, within the church, and on TV and satellite. It would certainly tend to dramatic, at the very least, locally.

This could be especially true in long-standing denominations where all ministry is done by volunteers. Ministering positions in these churches are filled by locating anyone who might be willing to do it. However, radical believers like these are not usually welcome. The leadership often sees them as competition. The people in the pews tend to be scared or uneasy. These people are normally shunned or asked to leave.

So, we are talking about people with developed gifts. In modern America we are probably talking about people in full-time ministry. No one else does this kind of thing any more. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was common to find relatively small bible studies in most of the mainline denominations who ministered in the gifts like this. Maybe this is the type of person Jesus is talking about.

Regardless, these are people who understand what is available spiritually. They believe in prophecy, demons, and miracles. They would seem to be assets to any church.

How is it possible that powerful ministers like this do not know Jesus?

We’ll talk more about that next week. These excerpts are from Knowing Jesus as His Bride, which is a book about becoming intimate with the Lord.

My goal is to get you to think about these things. They might well be crucial to your readiness for the Lord’s return. What do you think?

Are you ready for Jesus to come back?

To buy the whole book, check out the page

Related articles

• Starting a new series on the requirement to know Jesus  (last week)
• Church in the End Times: Apostasy and Cultism (lamblion.us)
• What Type of Christian Are You? Take the Test! (lamblion.us)