Watch the Fruit

“Beloved, while I was making every effort to write you about our common salvation, I felt the necessity to write to you appealing that you contend earnestly for the faith which was once for all handed down to the saints. For certain persons have crept in unnoticed, those who were long beforehand marked out for this condemnation, ungodly persons who turn the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.

Now I desire to remind you, though you know all things once for all, that the Lord, after saving a people out of the land of Egypt, subsequently destroyed those who did not believe. And angels who did not keep their own domain, but abandoned their proper abode, He has kept in eternal bonds under darkness for the judgment of the great day, just as Sodom and Gomorrah and the cities around them, since they in the same way as these indulged in gross immorality and went after strange flesh, are exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire.

Yet in the same way these men, also by dreaming, defile the flesh, and reject authority, and revile angelic majesties.” Jude 1:3-8

Jude writes that false teachers had “crept in (the church) unnoticed” (vs. 4). The original letter, written in Greek, carries a literal rendering of “settled in alongside.” Satan, as “the father of lies” (John 8:44), persistently seeks to mislead and destroy the human race. What better strategy that to place deceitful teachers within the church - teachers who distort biblical truth.
                               
However, such perpetrators are difficult to identify. They “settle in alongside” - “disguising themselves as apostles of Christ” (2 Cor. 11:13). Christ says that the “wheat” (believers) and the “tares” (unbelievers) will mingle together (Matt. 13:24-30). How do we unmask such false brethren? The Scriptures reveal that deceitful teachers will “deny” the Master (Jude 1:4; 2 Pet. 2:1). That denial is their visible lifestyle and witness.

“They (false teaches) profess to know God, but by their deeds they deny Him...” (Titus 1:16). They have “a form of godliness, although they have denied its power...” (2 Tim. 3:5). Cunning agents of Satan may disguise their preaching, but their deeds will expose them eventually.

“...you will know them by their fruits.” Matthew 7:20