Along with giving Christians a vocabulary to articulate biblical truths, many of the creeds were written in response to heretical teachings. False teaching will always be with us on this side of the resurrection (2 Pet. 2:1). While I adamantly oppose false teaching and I am continuously disgusted by bestselling books that infect the church, I am thankful that God in his wisdom and goodness even uses bad theology to spur his people further to the truth.

 
I’m just going to go ahead and embarrass myself here—for the sake of the gospel and all. When I was a sophomore in college, I was heavily convicted that I was not living my life according to who I was—a Christian. But I also realized that I really didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the faith that I professed. I began attending a local church, and I wish I could say that they befriended me and discipled me. I did get the smiley welcome, “Where are you from?” question, but was ignored beyond that.

So the next thing I did was visit the Christian bookstore, The Gospel Shoppe. After perusing the shelves and enjoying the smell of new books, I honed in on the table featuring local authors. There was a book there called The Fruit Bearer. I thought I could probably use some fruit in my life at this point. So I killed two birds with one stone; I bought a book that would support a local author and hopefully help me to be one of those fruitful Christians.

The female author was engaging and motivating. But she also wrote about something that I had never been exposed to—speaking in tongues. As it turns out, according to this friendly author, speaking in tongues was both a blessing and a sign that you are bearing the fruit of the Christian life. I wondered, is this real? I did want to bear fruit. But something didn’t seem right, even for this immature Christian.

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