Another danger among the Christian community is to assume that everyone understands and knows the gospel simply because they claim to be a follower of Jesus. This happens in the work of preaching (the heralding of the gospel) and it happens in general conversations in the community on a regular basis.

Never assume assumptions are safe. If you spend most of your time building your positions and beliefs based on assumptions, you will be a very shallow and misguided person. If you’re a preacher, well, you will be a very shallow and misguided preacher. Consider how easily it is for the devil to get into the details of assumptions. Below are a few dangerous assumptions that seem to be popular in our day.

1. Assuming everyone’s life is wonderful and that your friends are living the “dream life” simply by following their Instagram posts.
2. Assuming you know people because you follow them on social media.
3. Assuming you are real friends with people who you follow on social media.
4. Assuming a person doesn’t like you because they never interact with you on social media.

Remember that nice picture of your friend’s family enjoying a great vacation doesn’t contain the noise and drama of the children fighting and the lengthy list of other real life challenges that we all face. Stop allowing the sin of the human heart to lead you to jealousy and anger based on a simple social media post. The above list are just a few assumptions that are popular in our digital world, but what about “real life” that involves real conversations, actions, and church relationships?

Stop Assuming the Worst About People

How many people do you know who consistently embrace the worst about others merely based on assumptions gathered by body language or gossip gathered about the person without ever asking one question to the person in question? It’s really easy to build positions about people and to formulate what you believe about a person based on assumptions rather than reality. This is not only dangerously toxic, it’s a sinful misrepresentation of the person in your family, local church, neighbor, or co-worker.

Within the local church, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met with individuals who have built an entire library of opinions about another individual within their local church based completely on assumptions. When I push back and ask if they’ve gone to the person to verify the reality of the opinions, nearly every single time the person denies having every asked a single question to the person for verification. They would rather believe assumptions instead of reality. The devil laughs at such patterns because he can easily divide people who aren’t committed to truth.

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