Are You Testing the Spirits — Or Just Trusting the Preacher?

A Wake-Up Call to a Church Drifting from the Word of God

“Do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God,

because many false prophets have gone out into the world.” — 1 John 4:1, NIV

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Picture it with me. Sunday morning. The doors swing open and the sanctuary fills — perfume, aftershave, good shoes, warm smiles. The worship team launches into something powerful and the room comes alive. Hands go up. Eyes close. The atmosphere is electric, almost tangible, and for a moment you think: This. This is the church. Then the pastor steps to the pulpit, adjusts the microphone, and says those familiar words: “Turn with me to…” and the congregation reaches into pockets, purses, and cup holders. Screens light up. Faces tilt downward. And across an entire sanctuary of several hundred people, not one physical Bible is opened. Not one.

I sat there that morning, the morning that planted the seed for everything you are about to read ; clutching my worn leather Bible with its dog-eared pages and the margins crowded with my own handwriting. Dates. Underlines. Arrows pointing from one verse to another. Twenty years of conversation with the Living God recorded in those margins. And something stirred in my chest that I could not shake loose. It was not pride. It was not judgment. I want you to hear me clearly: it was grief. Deep, quiet, reverent grief. And underneath the grief ;urgency.

Because here is the question that has not left me since that Sunday: What happens to a church that no longer knows what the Word actually says? What happens to a people who have grown so accustomed to being served the Word that they have forgotten how to feed themselves? What happens when we are entertained rather than equipped — when the Sunday service is optimized for an experience rather than for the renewing of the mind? I believe we are already living in the answer to those questions. And the answer is sobering.

This post is not an attack on the church. I love the church. I love her enough to say what needs to be said. Walk with me.

The Drift is Real, and It’s Dangerous

There is a passage in Paul’s second letter to Timothy that used to feel like a far-off prophecy — something written for another era, another generation, another kind of people. It does not feel that way anymore. Read it slowly:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”— 2 Timothy 4:3–4, NIV

This is no longer a prophecy waiting to be fulfilled. This is a headline. This is Sunday morning in thousands of churches across the Western world. We live in an age where a pastor can build a congregation of tens of thousands without ever preaching through a book of the Bible. Where a “sermon” can be twenty minutes of personal anecdotes peppered with one or two verses stretched far beyond their context. Where the measure of a good Sunday is not “Did I encounter the truth of God?” but “Did I feel uplifted? Did it apply to my life? Did it make me feel good about my Monday?”

Charisma has replaced conviction. Feelings have replaced faith. Platforms have replaced the presence of God. And the people in the seats ; many of them genuinely hungry, genuinely sincere, are being fed cotton candy when they need bread. They leave the service with an emotional high that evaporates by Tuesday, wondering why their faith feels thin. They wonder why they crumble at the first sign of real trial. They wonder why the promises of God feel distant and theoretical. The answer, at least in part, is that they have been filling up on sermons and starving themselves of Scripture.

The drift is not always dramatic. It rarely announces itself. It happens incrementally, a slightly watered-down message here, a verse quietly dropped from a difficult passage there, a topic carefully avoided because it might thin the crowd. And before the congregation knows what has happened, they are miles from the shore of Biblical truth, floating in warm, comfortable water, with no anchor and no compass. The drift is real. It is dangerous. And the first step toward change is simply being willing to name it.

Blown About by Every Wind

The Apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus with a breathtaking image of what spiritual maturity is supposed to look like — and what its absence produces:

“Then we will no longer be infants, tossed back and forth by the waves, and blown here and there by every wind of teaching and by the cunning and craftiness of people in their deceitful scheming.”

— Ephesians 4:14, NIV

The image is not subtle. Infants. Tossed. Blown. There is nothing dignified or peaceful about it, it is the image of a person completely at the mercy of forces they cannot see clearly and cannot identify in time. And Paul says this is precisely what happens to believers who are not rooted who have not grown up into maturity in the Word. When you do not know what the Bible actually says, you become infinitely easier to mislead. Not because you are foolish, but because you have no anchor point from which to evaluate what is true.

And the winds are blowing, friends. They are blowing hard. There is a prosperity gospel that tells you faith is measured in financial reward and that suffering is always a sign of sin or insufficient belief and millions are buying it because it sounds like it could be in the Bible, even though it fundamentally misrepresents the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. There is a hyper-grace movement that has detached the grace of God from the call to repentance, producing a Christianity without holiness , a faith that forgives everything and demands nothing. There are New Age mysticism and occult practices; crystals, astrology, spirit guides, being quietly baptized in Christian language and seeping into worship spaces. And there are celebrity pastors around whom entire cultures of loyalty and devotion have formed cultures so thick that when a sheep finally works up the courage to say “that doesn’t match what I read in my Bible,” they are silenced, shamed, or simply shown the door.

The tragedy is that most of the people caught up in these winds are not rebellious. They are not malicious. They are genuinely seeking God. But genuine hunger does not protect you from counterfeit food. Only knowing what real food tastes like can do that. And that knowledge; that deep, personal, non-outsourced knowledge of the Word — is the very thing the modern church has been quietly letting slip away. The wind is blowing. And too many Christians do not even feel it.

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The Lost Art of Carrying Your Bible

I will be honest with you: I am old school. Unapologetically. I carry my physical Bible to church every single Sunday. I have done it for over thirty years, and I intend to keep doing it until the day God calls me home. My Bible is not pristine. It is not a decorative piece. It is well-loved to the point of being held together by a rubber band and a prayer. There are notes in the margins I wrote in my twenties when I was barely holding on.

I want to be clear: I am not against technology. My children have Bible apps. I use digital tools for research and study myself. But I am deeply, genuinely concerned about what Bible apps are doing to the discipline of Scripture engagement ;especially inside the walls of the church. When your Bible lives on your phone, it shares real estate with Instagram, Twitter, your email, your music, your news feed, and every group chat you have ever been added to. The temptation to drift mid-sermon, mid-verse, mid-moment is not hypothetical. It is one notification away. That is not a spiritual accusation. It is just honest because like many others, I have experienced it.

My children, are part of the Gen Z era who have grown up entirely in the age of the smartphone, bring their physical Bibles to church with them. I require it. Not as a legalistic rule, but as a discipline rooted in conviction. If they read a physical Bible at home, if they highlight and underline and write in the margins at home during their personal time with the Lord and our family fellowship time, why would they abandon that practice the moment they walk into the house of God? There is something irreplaceable about turning the pages yourself. Finding the book. Finding the chapter. Finding the verse. That process builds something — in the hand, in the eye, in the spirit. It slows you down in the best possible way. It teaches your children, and reminds your own soul, that the Word of God is not just an app among many apps. It is a living, breathing, indispensable treasure.

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.”— Psalm 119:105, NIV

“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”— Hebrews 4:12, NIV

A lamp. A sword. These are not passive tools. They require someone willing to pick them up, carry them, and use them. The church must recover the lost art , and the quiet dignity of actually carrying the Word.’

“Now the Bereans were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if these teachings were true.”

— Acts 17:11, NIV

The Bereans — A Model the Church Has Forgotten

In Acts 17, Paul and Silas arrive in Berea after being run out of Thessalonica. They go to the synagogue and begin to preach. And what Luke records next is one of the most quietly revolutionary moments in the entire New Testament. The Bereans, he writes, “were more noble-minded than the Thessalonians” — and the reason given is not that they were more educated, more spiritually gifted, or more emotionally responsive. The reason is this: they examined the Scriptures every single day to see if what Paul was teaching was true. They fact-checked an apostle. Daily.

Let that settle in for a moment. Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament, who met the risen Christ on the Damascus road, who was caught up into the third heaven, was being tested against Scripture by ordinary people in Berea. And rather than being offended, the Holy Spirit through Luke calls those people noble-minded. Testing was not rebellion. Verification was not disrespect. It was, in fact, the very model of mature, responsible faith.

If the Bereans tested an apostle, how much more should we, with all the charity and respect in the world test the preachers, teachers, life coaches, prophetic voices, and social media ministers who speak into our lives today? The church has quietly allowed a culture to develop in which loyalty to a pastor is treated as functionally equivalent to loyalty to God. In which asking hard questions is coded as divisive. In which the highest virtue is not discernment but deference. And the enemy.. who is cunning, patient, and deeply familiar with the human capacity for misplaced devotion has exploited that confusion to devastating effect.

The Berean model does not ask you to be suspicious. It does not ask you to sit in the pew with arms crossed and a heart closed. The Bereans received the message “with great eagerness.” They were hungry. They were engaged. And then they went home and opened the Scriptures. Both. Not one without the other. Eagerness and examination. Reception and verification. This is what it looks like to love the truth more than you love the feeling of being told what you want to hear.

Test Every Spirit — Yes, Even from the Pulpit

The instruction of 1 John 4:1 — “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” does not come with an asterisk. It does not say test every spirit except the one coming from your pastor. There is no exemption clause for celebrity preachers, apostolic networks, or ministries with large social media followings. The instruction is universal, and it is given to ordinary believers, not just to theologians, elders, or scholars. You and I are expected to test what we hear.

I know this can feel dangerous to say in certain church environments. Many believers have been taught sometimes explicitly, sometimes through the quiet pressure of church culture, that questioning a spiritual leader is tantamount to touching “God’s anointed.” They have been shown the story of David refusing to lift his hand against Saul, and the implication has been left hanging in the air: Don’t you dare question the man or woman of God.

But this is a misapplication of that passage, and it has produced a generation of believers who are spiritually dependent, easily exploited, and completely unprepared to recognize a wolf in shepherd’s clothing.

Here is what I know to be true: a shepherd who preaches the truth has absolutely nothing to fear from a congregation that opens its Bibles. Truth does not shrink from examination. It welcomes it. The problem arises when the word being preached from the pulpit cannot survive contact with the Word being read in the pew. That is when the request not to question begins to make a different kind of sense.

“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who does not need to be ashamed and who correctly handles the word of truth.”— 2 Timothy 2:15, NIV

This verse is usually preached at ministers. But it belongs to every believer. You are called to handle the word of truth correctly. You are called to study to show yourself approved. The most loving thing a congregation can do for a pastor is to hold them accountable — gently, graciously, and firmly to the Word they have been entrusted to preach. That is not rebellion. That is the church functioning as God designed it.

It Is Time for the Church to Wake Up

Beloved, this is not the moment for comfortable Christianity. This is not the season to be spiritually passive, to outsource your formation to a podcast, or to assume that sitting in a church building once a week is sufficient armor for the world you walk back into on Monday morning. Every single believer, regardless of how long you have been saved, regardless of how wonderful your pastor is, regardless of how genuine your church family may be, carries a personal, non-transferable responsibility before God to know His Word.

The Holy Spirit was given so that He would “guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). But He guides people who are actually moving. He illuminates a path for feet that are actually walking. He speaks to minds that are actually open and ears that are actually listening — through the Word. You cannot be guided into all truth if you are not regularly, personally, and prayerfully reading His Word. A digest of someone else’s reading does not substitute for your own encounter with the living God through Scripture.

Let me ask you something honest. What if the sermon you heard last Sunday was seventy percent accurate and thirty percent the preacher’s personal opinion, cultural assumption, or outright doctrinal error? Would you know? What if a subtle theological distortion embedded itself into your worldview three months ago and you have been quietly living by it ever since ;making decisions, forming expectations, building your faith on a foundation that is slightly, dangerously off? The only safeguard, the only one — is personal, regular, consistent engagement with the written Word of God.

So here is my call to you, as simply as I can put it: Dust off your Bible. Open it. Not just for five minutes before you fall asleep, but with intention and time and prayer. Bring it to every church meeting or service. Make your children bring theirs. Build a home where the Word is not a religious obligation but the living center — the bread on the table, the air in the room, the language you speak and the foundation you stand on. You were not meant to be a consumer of someone else’s spiritual life. You were meant to have your own.

I want you to know something before you move on to the next post or close this page. I am not writing this from a pedestal. I have sat in a few pews where error was preached and said nothing. I have nodded along to a sermon I should have taken home and examined. I have been the person who assumed that because it sounded right, it was right. And I have paid the price for that kind of passivity in seasons of my life that I do not wish on anyone. Everything I am writing here, I am writing to myself as much as to you.

But I have also seen what a life rooted in Scripture looks like. I have seen it in my own home; in the eyes of my children when a passage of Scripture suddenly makes sense and they look up at me like something just clicked. I have seen it in my husband’s walk with God and my own walk with God, in the middle of the night, in the hardest chapters of my life, when the Word was the only thing holding me together. And I believe, with everything in me.. that the church can return to this. The Protestant Reformation was not started by theologians in towers. It was sparked by ordinary people getting access to Scripture in their own language and refusing to let any system, any tradition, or any personality stand between them and the Word of God. We need another reformation. Not of theology alone. Of devotion. Of discipline. Of hunger.

Start today. Open the Word. Test what you hear. Carry your Bible. Become the Berean the church so desperately needs. And when someone asks why you still carry that worn, dog-eared, margin-covered book under your arm on Sunday morning, you can tell them; with a smile and without apology — that you are not quite ready to put down your sword.

“Test everything. Hold on to what is good.” — 1 Thessalonians 5:21, NIV

Thank you for reading!

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