Daily Devotional 12-10-2021
Rom 16:17-18 CSB 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, (18) 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. Paul could not resist giving a final word of warning that they watch out for spiritual enemies: those who are divisive and seek to hinder the Lord’s work in your way that are contrary to the teaching you have learned). Believers are to keep away from such false teachers, who were not serving Christ, but were slaves to their own appetites. They were selfish gluttons. The problem, however, was that by smooth talk and flattery they deceived the minds of naive people.
Daily Devotional 11-20-2021
Heb 13:9 Don’t be led astray by various kinds of strange teachings; for it is good for the heart to be established by grace and not by food regulations, since those who observe them have not benefited. That is why new doctrines which conflict with the unchanging message about Jesus Christ should be rejected. The author’s reference here to all kinds of strange teachings does not sound at all like a reference to normative Judaism but as if the readers were confronting a peculiar, sectarian variation of that religion.