Matthew 16:6-12

What is it that brought us into our spiritual bondage? It was teaching and that is what doctrine is, doctrine is a teaching. All of us have had religious and spiritual teaching prior to conversion even though we may have never belonged to a church.

There is spiritual teaching out there in the world and we pick it up from family and friends, we pick it up even in business. There is no way that some form of spiritual teaching cannot come into our mind because Satan is the ruler of this world and he is a spirit being. His spirit permeates this entire earth and we are going to have spiritual teaching whether we like it or not, whether we were ever part of a church, whether we were ever religious or not.

Jesus said, "To beware of the leaven, beware of the doctrine of the Pharisees and Sadducees." So if we can just get the lesson and understand what it is that has brought us into bondage is the spiritual teaching that we received prior to converting to the truth. What He also tells us here, without saying it directly, is that leavening is something that is ingested so that it becomes a part of us. And we have to add one more thing that is not here directly, but indirectly—leaven is bad in a spiritual sense, otherwise why would Jesus say "beware"?

There is nowhere in the Bible that God calls His Word leaven. It is just not there, because the two do not equate. It would be like an oxymoron which sort of tells you two things at the same time, something that is impossible. Leaven, therefore, is something that could lead to disaster in terms of remembering or getting a lesson and it is also a symbol of something that could be innocently ingested.

These disciples were not even aware that they were taking in something that was bad for them. Even when we were part of the world, we were innocently taking things into us that we did not understand, ignorantly, but they were not good for us, they were bad for us, it was simply a part of society. In fact, what we take in, in regard to spiritual things, may even appear very good and pleasurable.

How many times have you heard, maybe even sung, "give me that old time religion"? Sounds like fun, sounds like it is good, sounds like it is pleasurable, it might even be stimulating. When I was a boy, I attended some Pentecostal churches of God with my grandmother and some of my aunts and uncles and boy, those people were stimulated there. They were fired up. But, you see, if it is leaven, there is no end to its bad consequences even though at the time that it is ingested it seems to be pleasurable and stimulating.

All conduct is the result of what we have learned in the past and nothing will change in our lives unless we remember the lessons of our experiences and consciously choose to do the good now that it is available to us. This is not always easy.

Learning something requires repeated drilling—practice, practice, practice—whenever we are confronted with the responsibility of changing something that was innocently learned in the past. We practice all of our lives until we find out that it needs to be changed, and then reverse what was accepted in the past innocently and willingly. When we go to try to change that, getting that leaven, that old teaching, the doctrines that are false out of there, is difficult to an extreme.

We are not only required to practice, practice, practice, drill, drill, drill by God, doing exercises, but those exercises are designed to ingrain a certain procedure that will produce a certain result that is good, you see, in God's eyes. But all too often the drilling and the practice and the doing of exercises in the past was in the wrong things. Taken in innocently but utterly devastating to character and to attitude and the product was not what God intended.

Matthew 16:8-10

Here are these men who were witnessing all of these awesome things that He was doing, and He accused them, He indicted them of not having very much faith. Now one would think that if miracles build faith, there surely should have been faith in those men above all people on earth. They knew the things were genuine. But they do not have much value in terms of building faith. That is why God is not concerned about working miracles with us all the time. They do not really help all that much. Let us go on.

That quickly they forgot it. They forgot the miracles that quickly. See, they did not understand the nature of His ministry and so they could not make the right connections.