Who's Leading Who?

There's a stretch of the fence line where I've stopped even trying to keep count. Brazilian pepper, every one of them a volunteer, not one I planted, seeded by birds who ate the berries in my neighbor's yard and did what birds do afterward. I pull the saplings when I catch them small, root and all if I can manage it, because I've learned the hard way that cutting the stem back only makes it angrier. Leave it for a few weeks and it's not a sapling anymore, it's a thicket, dense enough to swallow whatever stands near.

What gets me is how ordinary it looks while it's happening. It's not some monstrous, obviously-wrong plant. It's green, it's leafy, it fills a bare patch fast, and if you didn't know better you'd think something was finally growing well back there. That's the part that should worry you more than the thicket does. The danger was never that it looks like a threat. The danger is that it doesn't.

Chinese tallow is worse in that respect, in my opinion. For years, people planted it on purpose. Nurseries sold it. It was marketed as a handsome shade tree, fall color and all, the kind of thing you'd choose. Nobody was tricked into an obvious mistake. They were sold a good idea that turned out to be a bad one, and by the time that became clear, it had already spread through the wetlands. That's not carelessness. That's a false good, dressed up convincingly enough that the people who planted it thought they were doing something right.

I think about that when I think about the ideas I let take root in my own head without checking where they actually came from.

2 Peter has a lot to say about this, and it's more pointed than I expected the first time I sat with it. "But there were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies." (2 Peter 2:1) Secretly. Not with a warning label. Not announcing themselves as the threat they are. Peter goes on: "And many will follow their destructive ways, because of whom the way of truth will be blasphemed." (2 Peter 2:2) Followed, not forced. People walk into it willingly, because it was never presented as a trap. It was presented as wisdom.

David Guzik makes the same observation reading this same passage, that no false teacher ever introduces himself as a false teacher. Nobody stands up and says, trust me, I'm the one crowding out your reliance on Christ. They arrive looking reasonable, even helpful, the same way Chinese tallow arrived at the nursery labeled as a shade tree rather than what it actually was.

Here's where I have to be careful, because I don't want to overstate this into something it isn't. Therapy, coaching, good self-help writing, none of that is Brazilian pepper. Plenty of it is more like the plants we actually chose for this yard, useful, healthy, worth having around. The test was never “is this modern” or “is this outside the Bible.” The test is what it's quietly asking to replace. A philosophy that says look inward, trust your own truth, you are your own highest authority, doesn't have to announce itself as competing with Christ's leadership. It just has to grow long enough, unquestioned enough, that one day you look up and Christ's lordship over your life has been crowded into a corner by something you never got around to naming.

Peter isn't asking his readers to distrust every new idea on sight. He's asking them to stay awake. "But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:18) That's the safeguard, not suspicion of everything new, but a leadership so established, so rooted, that anything trying to quietly replace it gets noticed a lot sooner than a Brazilian pepper sapling does.

I still walk that fence line every few weeks, because I know what happens if I don't. And I've started asking the same question of what I let into my head. Not “is this bad,” but “who's actually leading here, if I let this take root.” Some things earn a place in the yard. Some things just need pulling, root and all, before they get their chance to spread.