“Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who create divisions and obstacles contrary to the teaching that you learned. Avoid them, because such people do not serve our Lord Christ but their own appetites. They deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting with smooth talk and flattering words.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I am a committed believer that the church should be a place for everyone. When the church is operating properly, no one should not be able to find their place there. It doesn’t matter how rich or poor a person is. It doesn’t matter how educated or simple they are. It doesn’t matter whether they are black or white or brown or red or yellow or any other color on the palette. National origins make no difference. Politics don’t matter. Even sports affiliation is something we can learn to have grace for. Everyone is welcome in the church…except for some people. Let’s take a minute today to talk about some people we don’t want in the church.

The church and its affiliated institutions face all sorts of threats today. Just the other day in this country a legal decision was released from a case out of Washington state in which a ministry won the right to be able to hire only staff who were aligned with its expressed statement of belief. The State had tried to force religious organizations to have to hire workers who didn’t agree with or support their fundamental beliefs. Imagine a church being forced to hire someone as a pastor who wasn’t a Christian. That’s the logical end of such efforts.

Of course, in other parts of the world the church and Christians are facing much more physically threatening attacks than this. China actively persecutes all of its churches. Russia regularly persecutes churches that are not formally and publicly aligned with the State. In North Korea you are risking your life to even be found in possession of a Bible.

But for all of these different threats from the world, none of them seem to have much of an impact on the church’s advancement in the world. The church has always faced threats like this. Jesus assured His followers that they would face trouble and hardships in their efforts to advance His kingdom in this world. Simply being known by His name is enough to attract plenty of ire from the world because He represents an existential threat to the world’s power; an existential threat it actively looks to remove.

When you look through the record of the Scriptures, while we see plenty of warnings about the reality of such pushback and persecution as this, never are they treated as all that big of a deal. They are hard, sure. We should live in such a way as to not intentionally invite them, yes. But there’s not much else we can do about them. Besides, we already know that our victory in the end is secured, so we can endure them while leaning into the character of Christ for our response and keeping right on advancing in our mission.

There is a kind of threat, though, that the various authors of the New Testament treat with a much higher degree of seriousness. This threat is one that we receive active instructions for eliminating more than once. We see an example of this right here. There are actually two threats that reached this level of significance for the apostles and their allies. These are the threats of false teaching and disunity and division within the body. These didn’t pose any threat to the church’s physical existence the way attacks from the state do. Rather, these kinds of attacks threaten the church from the inside. They threaten to break it apart at its foundations and to weaken its natural defenses to the point that the external attacks can accomplish their intended ends.

When people who claim no amount of allegiance to the church threaten it from the outside, the response we are instructed to give is one of love and compassion. Even though that person or those people are currently being used by our enemy to attack us, they are really victims of his machinations who are in need of an experience of the love of Christ in hopes of transforming them by the power of the Gospel of Christ from foes to friends, freeing them from the enslaving oppression of their current master. And this kind of thing does indeed happen as Paul himself could powerfully attest.

But when people who claim to be on our side serve as the catalyst for these more significant internal threats, while the love of Christ is still our primary animating principle, we are to actively work to separate them from the church community, revealing them as the unbelievers they are acting like – and may in fact actually be – so that we can protect our core from their evil aims.

This is what we see in this bit of parting advice from Paul to the Roman believers. He has spent the rest of the letter laying out the Gospel for them in glorious detail, and giving them lots of instructions for living it out to the glory of God in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. There are those who would look to divide them one from another and separate them from the Gospel. These are wolves in sheep’s clothing looking to isolate Jesus’ lambs to make them easier to pick off. Paul’s advice here is direct and clear: “Now I urge you, brothers and sisters, to watch out for those who create divisions and obstacles contrary to the teaching that you learned.”

We need to watch out for people who create division in the church. These are not those who merely express opinions that differ from the majority. These are folks who use their words to create groups and then to set one group against another. They use gossip and rumors to turn friends against each other. Their words are slick and smooth, but their intent is deadly. We need to watch out as well for those who begin to teach things that are not consistent with the Gospel of Christ. These may use their charisma to subtly lead believers who are still early in their faith journey away from the Gospel foundation they started building on in another direction.

The solution here is not to show them compassion and grace. It is not to tolerate them with kindness and care. It is not to continue fellowshipping with them because they are already a part of the body. Instead, we must “avoid them.” We must create breaks from them. We must pursue separation of ourselves from their influence and of them from the body. They are working with the enemy against the church meaning they were never really a part of the church in the first place. We must drop the pretense and acknowledge the truth fully for what it is.

We do this because they are not pursuing the same goal as we are. “Avoid them, because such people do not serve our Lord Christ but their own appetites. They deceive the hearts of the unsuspecting with smooth talk and flattering words.” They worm their way in so they can tear us apart. They are agents of the enemy whose work is much more threatening than any external effort of the state against us. Divided one from another and lured away to build on a foundation that will not hold, we become easy pickings for the wolves of the world.

The response to the threat these kinds of attacks needs to be twofold. First, we must move to eliminate the threat. When someone reveals himself to be an agent of the enemy hiding in plain sight in the church, we must take action to remove him from the church and treat him like the unbeliever that he is. We don’t do this in a way that is ugly or harsh. We do it with a broken heart because we once thought he was one of us. He was perhaps a friend and presumed brother before the truth was revealed. We do it with the love of Christ as our guide. With the truth of his actual status now in the open, although we cannot consider him our brother in Christ any longer, we now look at him as he truly is: One who is trapped in sin and in need of an experience of the love of Christ through the Gospel. But, because He is not our brother in Christ, we cannot continue treating him as if he were, giving him access to things in the church to which he should not have access.

The second response must be to make sure we are so thoroughly rooted in the truth that we can quickly tell when other people aren’t. We must not accept anyone into membership without first thoroughly vetting them and their story. We shouldn’t have instant membership, but a waiting period in which we give them opportunity to demonstrate Gospel fruit and their commitment to Christ. We must fence the church well and protect the sheep carefully so that we can stand firmly and together when (not if) the world comes attacking.

The church matters, and if we don’t guard it carefully, we risk losing the thing we hold so dear. Let’s make sure we know who is who in the church and out so that we can treat them all with the love of Christ appropriately.