On-line preaching can be tremendously helpful. But it brings with it a few dangers. Watch out for false and novel teaching. Watch out for the temptation to find a teacher, any teacher, any teacher at all, who agrees with you and goes against what others are telling you. Use your resources wisely. But do not let your resources take you out of faithful Christian living in your local church. Do not daydream about having a legend for a pastor or feel the urge to reshape your pastor into your favorite conference personality. Be grateful for faithful teaching, but do not assume that simply consuming content has sanctified you.

Preach the word! The Lord commands it. The body is blessed by it. The sermon is a good and necessary thing for the life of the believer.
In today’s world, the believer has access to more of the preached word than ever before. We can read books of collected messages. We can stream our favorite Bible teachers. We can turn on RYM Radio and hear teaching all day long. We can Google the Internet (I hear that’s what the kids call it), and find videos of pastors of small churches we will never hear of in any other way.
But, as a pastor, one who preaches weekly (and hopefully not weakly), can I warn you of a danger or two in too much on-line sermon consumption? I’m quite grateful for the resources that the Lord has placed at our fingertips, but I fear that some believers may move from being helped to being harmed by their consumption of material on-line.
I Know a Secret
One danger of on-line sermons that I think we would all agree on is the risk of consuming false teaching. This is more likely when a believer is listening to a pastor or scholar about whom they know nothing. If you are listening to a message or reading an article written by someone whose scholarship is not being checked by others, you run the risk of novel and even dangerous teaching.
One of the attractions of many an on-line message is the fact that it teaches you something you have never heard before. It is possible to run across a man who is translating the Hebrew of Genesis for himself and saying things about what it means to be human that no faithful teacher has ever taught. If a believer is not careful here, he or she may come away with a damaging, false belief that was all the more dangerous for feeling like it was something secret that no other teacher has brought forth.
I’d bet that you have heard of the problem of Gnosticism in the early church. Among the dangerous beliefs of the Gnostics was the ego-boosting belief that they possessed secret knowledge that was not available to the general public. It was easy for folks to love the fact that they were let in on the stuff that other, ordinary people could not grasp. See any similarities to how some folks feel about that special teacher they have found on-line?
Choose-Your-Own-Doctrine
Do you remember choose-your-own-adventure books? These were popular before video games took the idea to a whole new level. A reader would follow the story of a hero until a particular turning point: enter the cave or climb the mountain? The reader would turn to a different page of the book to find out what happened to the hero depending on the choice the reader made for the hero. Perhaps the cave contained a dragon. Perhaps the mountain led to a castle and a princess. The point was to give the reader a sense of adventure by being able to pick the kind of story he or she wanted to read.
Similar to the draw of novel and dangerous doctrine is the temptation to pick and defend your own favorite teaching. Sometimes people will have a particular point of doctrine they want others to agree with. Instead of examining faithful teaching of faithful teachers, the eager learner will scour the Internet for the one teacher who says it just the way they want to hear. Want to find that Calvinist who dunks on your Arminian friends, no problem. Want to find that Arminian preacher who makes your Calvinist friends look like cold-hearted robots, piece of cake. Want to find somebody who interprets a particular passage in accord with your strange preferences? This one might take a bit more work, but the Internet is a big place, and lots of people have said lots of crazy things over the years; so it can be done.
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God knows that, in the lives of faithful believers, we will face the temptation to walk away from the faith. Sure, there will be times when that temptation will come to us from outside of our inner circle. Sometimes the world will try to tempt us to turn away through persecution or greed. But one of the more effective and more dangerous temptations we face is when someone we deeply care about tries to call us away from faithfulness to the Lord. 

From the garden to today, followers of God have faced opposition to the faith. Sometimes that opposition comes in the form of hatred and persecution. Sometimes it comes in the form of sly temptation. And sometimes it comes in the form of well-intentioned but dangerous godlessness.
Think about the strategies that the devil has used against the people of God which have made the most headway. Often times, persecuting the church with out-and-out aggression has served to strengthen the faith of believers—the blood of the martyrs being the seed of the church. But sometimes the devil’s plots are much more intimate, much more subtle, and honestly much more dangerous than violence. When the enemy of our souls tempts us through people we genuinely care for, the temptation is significant.
God is not surprised that humanity is often swayed by the influence of our loved ones. IN fact, in Deuteronomy, the Lord spoke a dire warning to the people of Israel regarding this very topic.
Deuteronomy 13:6-11
6 “If your brother, the son of your mother, or your son or your daughter or the wife you embrace or your friend who is as your own soul entices you secretly, saying, ‘Let us go and serve other gods,’ which neither you nor your fathers have known, 7 some of the gods of the peoples who are around you, whether near you or far off from you, from the one end of the earth to the other, 8 you shall not yield to him or listen to him, nor shall your eye pity him, nor shall you spare him, nor shall you conceal him. 9 But you shall kill him. Your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterward the hand of all the people. 10 You shall stone him to death with stones, because he sought to draw you away from the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. 11 And all Israel shall hear and fear and never again do any such wickedness as this among you.
As a quick explanation for any who are apt to misunderstand this passage, the legal standards for national Israel in the Old Testament were quite strict. This nation was uniquely the people of God in this time period, given the law of God, in the presence of God, under the direct instruction of God, and carrying the promise of God to send Messiah, the only plan God ever had for the salvation of people from all nations.
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Why go to worship on Sunday? Obedience is a good reason. The fact that going might just encourage your soul is a solid reason. But when you are struggling, and when those reasons are not moving you forward, perhaps remembering that you are needed will help. When a believer is absent, the local church is the less for that absence. We are a body, and we need all our members together for our mutual good. 

Why should I go to church when I just don’t feel like it? Aren’t I just being a hypocrite? Why go if I feel like I won’t get anything out of it this week?
As a pastor, I find myself regularly helping people work through reasons why they should not give up gathering together with other believers (cf. Heb. 10:24-25). Quite often, my words of encouragement go down two paths. On the one hand, I remind believers that gathering for worship is fitting in keeping with the commands of God. Obedience calls you to discipline yourself to gather and worship. On the other hand, I will try to encourage believers that, even when they do not expect to personally gain from the service, they may be surprised. God often breaks through our stony hearts and enlivens our souls when we gather together with his people under his word for his glory. God has designed our worship in the church, not only to honor him—which is primary—but also to feed flagging souls and nourish hungry hearts.
Today, I want to ponder yet a third reason to gather that I do not often point to, but which is of great importance. It popped up in my daily Bible reading.
1 Corinthians 12:21-26
The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and on those parts of the body that we think less honorable we bestow the greater honor, and our unpresentable parts are treated with greater modesty, which our more presentable parts do not require. But God has so composed the body, giving greater honor to the part that lacked it, that there may be no division in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.
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In our lives, we have questions. How long, O Lord? Why did this happen? When will you change things? How will you help us make ends meet? Any of these questions can be pleasing to the Lord. Any of them can dishonor him. The heart behind the question, the faith behind the question, these are the issues that make the questions right or wrong.

Why? How? When? All of us who know the Lord have questions for him. But are they OK? Is it right to question God?
Interestingly, the answer is not as simple as one might think. There is no clear yes or no. Sometimes in Scripture, people ask God questions and get the answer. Sometimes, questions earn judgment. The content of the question is not the primary issue. The issue is one of heart.
Consider two questions from Luke chapter 1. In this chapter, two people ask an angel rather comparable questions. Zechariah and Mary both have something they want to know. To the casual observer, it might even look like they are asking the same sort of thing. But Zechariah meets with displeasure and judgment while Mary has her question answered.
When the angel Gabriel tells Zechariah that he and his wife will soon have a son, the old priest cannot fathom how this might come to pass.
Luke 1:18-21 – 18 And Zechariah said to the angel, “How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” 19 And the angel answered him, “I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. 20 And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these things take place, because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.”
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