To further add on what you have said
Another issue is relying on the teachings of only one church.
As an ex-serial church hopper, I have released that different churches specialize in understanding of certain parts of scripture and tend to misinterpret the rest.
The Lutheran church understands righteousness by faith very well, but they do not have a good understanding of sanctification.
The Methodist church understands sanctification very well, but does have a good understanding of baptism.
The Baptist church understands baptism very well but do not have a good understanding of the end times. And I could go on.
So every church has a bit of truth and a bit of misinterpretation. Another problem that I have also identified is that churches tend to focus on certain parts of the bible and never address the rest. They also tend to focus on certain bible verses on a subject and ignore the rest resulting in them having a one sided view about a certain subject and do not look at the full picture.
Proverbs 11:14 says that “
Where there is no counsel, the people fall; But in the multitude of counselors there is safety”. Therefore I do not think that it is always a good idea to only look at the interpretations of one pastor or one church since they tend to have a one-sided view of scripture. It is better to listen to interpretations of different churches to get a more balanced view and then ask God to give you wisdom to decide for yourself which one is the correct interpretation (James 1:5).
I personally do not like to accuse any church of being a false church or say that certain churches have false teachings. I believe that the bible is not an easy book to understand and churches misinterpret certain parts of it. Bible misinterpretation is a problem of every church and every Christian.
I am especially opposed to demonizing churches and calling them cults, like calling the Seventh Day Adventist church a satanic cult. I have personally spoken to SDA Christians about their beliefs and they we were able to provide bible verses for what they believed, so we cannot accuse them of being false or satanic. We can only accuse them of misinterpretation if we disagree with them. They having a bible verse/s for some of their strange beliefs made it hard to convince them that they were wrong, so the only issue was interpretation.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses have a bible that has a lot of missing bible verses, so we will never agree with them on a lot of things, but does this qualify for them to be called a cult? Deceived maybe, but calling them a cult is an exaggeration. The problem is that they are not always straight-forward in saying what they believe.
Being Teachable
Overall, God is the best teacher because man and churches are fallible.
But whether we rely on only God or both man and God, we must have a teachable spirit.
A person is teachable when they have the following characteristics:
- He/she has a mindset that they do not know everything and that they could be wrong about a lot of things.
- He/she is ready and willing to change his/her beliefs after getting additional clarification about certain parts of scripture even if he/she has believed a certain interpretation for 10, 20 or even 30 years.
- He/she does not look at who the messenger is, but focuses on the message and accepts the message if it is biblical.
- He/she is willing to accept beliefs that are 100% biblical, even if most people do not believe in them. Even if they are the only one that believes in them. This is the most difficult principle to implement because people tend to ostracize and criticize those who do not agree with mainstream Christianity.
- We have a lot of examples of this in history like Martin Luther. He believed in justification by faith and was called heretic by the Papacy because his belief was not what the Church of Rome or any church taught at that time. He stood up against the Papacy by himself, while others refused to stand along with him. There are plenty more like him such as John Wesley, John Huss, and William Tyndale etc.
- Therefore you have to be someone like the Protestant Reformers who realized that the majority do not decide what truth is. The bible says what truth is even if it not agreeable to everyone.