False Prophets and the Fruit They Bear
Preached at Blue Ocean Faith Columbus on Sunday, March 8, 2026
Reminder: I never stick completely to my written sermon. This isn’t a transcript, but the written sermon I was using when I preached.
Opening Story
In certain, strange, corners of the internet largely contained to TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube, it’s become a common practice for “Christians” to call Christian pastors they either don’t agree with or whom they find objectionable for some reasons, such as the pastor is Queer or a woman, a “false prophet.” While I once read the label as rude, meanspirited, and not a little bit hateful, I now realize that the “false prophets” of the digital age of evangelism have names like Brandan Robertson, Nadia Bolz Weber, William Barber, JJ Warren, Kate Common, Yvette Flunder, and, yes, even in death, Rachel Held Evans. Adding “Ben Huelskamp” to that great cloud of witness seems far more like an honor than any sort of pejorative.
I’m sure you all know why we get the label “false prophets” and from whom that appellation is received, but I struggle with the term “false prophets” when it’s applied to almost any person. A great and classical example is the Rev. Dr. Albert Mohler. If you don’t know his name, he’s the long reigning president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most acknowledged intellectuals of the Evangelical movement. Though he has and continues to preach in churches around the world, his first call has always been as an educator and writer. He’s waged intellectual wars with almost every name in secular and progressive spaces both politically and theologically. Progressive Christians often call Mohler a false prophet. I don’t think that’s fair. Yes, Mohler’s theology is often wrong, and he presents it with the generosity of Jonathan Edwards but being wrong and being a false prophet are two distinct positions.
Wholeheartedly believing something which turns out to be wrong based on your thorough study of the issue or topic is not a moral failing. The moral issue of a false prophet is knowing that something is wrong or untrue and still choosing to preach the falsehood.
The Warning in Context
In tonight’s scripture, we meet Jesus near the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He’s been teaching the crowds on a hillside in Galilee. His audience are ordinary people, many of them poor, many of them struggling under the weight of Roman occupation and religious structures that seemed more interested in maintaining order than delivering liberation. He’s told them that the poor in spirit are blessed. He’s told them to love their enemies, to pray for those who persecute them, to seek first the kin-dom of God. And now, almost as a closing charge, he issues a warning: watch out for the wolves.
Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves.
The image is stark. False prophets don’t announce themselves. They don’t walk in wearing a sign that reads “dangerous.” They come dressed for the occasion. They speak the language. They use the right words. They perform impressive things. They have platforms and followings, and they often care more about the size of their following than they care about the people who make up their following. And yet Jesus says: watch carefully. Look at the fruit.
Now here’s a question worth sitting with for a moment: Who is Jesus warning? He isn’t warning Rome. He isn’t warning the Pharisees in this moment. He’s warning his own followers, the people who love him, the people gathering to hear him. The danger of the false prophet is a danger from within the community of faith. It’s an inside job.
That’s what makes this passage so urgent, and so uncomfortable. It would be easier if Jesus were warning us about people clearly outside the faith. But he isn’t. He’s warning us about people who will speak with complete sincerity; people who believe they’re doing the work of God. The test Jesus gives us is not theological correctness. It’s not impressive ministry. The test is fruit. What does the life and teaching of this person actually produce in the world?
The Fruit Test and the Rewriting of Jesus
So, what does good fruit look like? Good fruit looks like mercy. It looks like peacemaking. It looks like care for the poor, the mourning, the hungry. It looks like loving your enemies and praying for those who persecute you. The fruit of faithfulness, in Jesus’ own teaching, is unmistakably oriented toward the vulnerable and the marginalized.
This is why we have to reckon honestly with what is happening in our own moment, in our own country, in our own religious landscape. There is a movement that wraps itself in the language of Jesus while bearing a very different kind of fruit. We are, of course, talking about Christian nationalism. A theology, if we can call it that, that blends Christian identity with national identity, that fuses the cross with the flag, and that is far more interested in dominance than in service.
Christian nationalism doesn’t just get Jesus’ priorities out of order. It rewrites them. It takes the Jesus who said, “blessed are the meek” and replaces him with a triumphalist vision of Christian power over culture, over government, and over anyone deemed an outsider. In fact, it enjoys making people outsiders because those people haven’t lived up to its standards or have willfully transgressed its teachings. That is unless a person has wealth or power, then Christian nationalism is all too happy to embrace, even ordain, that person as a true servant of God.
Christian nationalism takes the Jesus who crossed every boundary to welcome the stranger and replaces him with a theology of exclusion. It takes the Jesus who said, “love your neighbor as yourself” and carves out exceptions—immigrants, LGBTQIA+ people, poor people, and its own political enemies—until love is so qualified it is barely recognizable as love. It becomes the kind of love of which people have rightly judged that “there is no greater hate than Christian love.”
And perhaps most destructive, Christian nationalism conflates the Kin-dom of God with the United States. It treats American power as sacred power. It suggests that God’s purpose in the world runs through American supremacy, that to be a faithful Christian is to be a certain kind of American, and to be a certain kind of American is to be on the side of God. But the Kin-dom of God doesn’t have borders. It doesn’t have a flag. The God of the Sermon on the Mount is not the patron deity of any empire. God’s reign is about the flourishing of all people, especially the ones that empires discard.
Jesus says: you will know them by their fruit. So, look at the fruit. When a theology produces contempt for immigrants, cruelty toward the poor, dehumanization of LGBTQIA+ people, and the celebration of power for its own sake, that theology is clearly not good fruit. You can wrap it in Scripture. You can perform great things in Jesus’ name. But the fruit doesn’t lie.
The fruit of the Spirit, Paul tells us in Galatians, is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That’s the standard. Not political dominance. Not cultural victory. Not an impressive platform. Kindness. Gentleness. Love.
Lord, Lord — and the Grace That Precedes Our Works
But now we have to sit with the harder edge of this passage. Because there’s a second group Jesus warns about, and this point cuts differently.
“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven…On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’”
These are not people who were indifferent to Jesus. These are people who did things, impressive things, significant things, things that looked like ministry. They prophesied. They performed works of power. They invoked his name. And he says: I never knew you.
The will of God in heaven, as Jesus defines it across the Sermon on the Mount, isn’t primarily about deeds. It’s about mercy. It’s about the orientation of the heart. It is about how you treat the person in front of you, the neighbor who needs food, the stranger who needs welcome, the person whose dignity is being stripped away by systems of power.
Here is the good news at the center of all of this: our standing before God is never something we earn. It’s never something we achieve. We don’t work our way into God’s favor. God’s grace runs ahead of every one of our efforts. Before we prophesied anything, before we did any mighty work, before we said a single word, we were known, and loved, and claimed by God. The work we do in the world is not a down payment on grace. It’s a response to the grace that has already found us.
The question is not: Have I done enough great things to earn God’s approval? The question is: Is Jesus forming me? Am I letting his vision of the world, where the poor are blessed and the meek inherit the earth and love is the final word, am I letting that vision reshape how I see and treat people? Is my life bearing the fruit of that formation?
Invitation and Hope
So where does this leave us? I want to close with the hope that is underneath all of this.
The reason Jesus warns us about false prophets is not to fill us with suspicion and anxiety. The reason he warns us is that he believes we can tell the difference. He trusts us with this discernment. He believes that people formed by his teaching will recognize the fruit of genuine love when they see it and will recognize its counterfeit as well. The warning is an act of confidence in us.
And the reason he warns against doing great works as a performance rather than as a response to love is not to make us feel like we can never do enough. It’s to set us free from the exhausting treadmill of spiritual achievement. You do not have to earn your place in the heart of God. You are already there. The invitation is not to perform your way into God’s favor. The invitation is to be known, really known, by the One who loved you before you ever opened your mouth or did any work.
Out of that knowing, out of being loved first, comes the fruit. Not the fruit of ambition or power or religious performance. The fruit of mercy. The fruit of welcome. The fruit of a life shaped by the Sermon on the Mount, oriented always toward the flourishing of the neighbor, the stranger, the last, the least, the lost.
In a world full of wolves in sheep’s clothing, in a moment when the language of Jesus is being used to justify things Jesus stood against, the most radical thing we can do is bear good fruit. Love people well. Welcome those the world is turning away. Work for the flourishing of our neighbors. Let the Kin-dom come, not through power, not through dominance, not through the sheer volume of our impressive deeds, but through the small, steady, faithful practice of love.
You will know them by their fruits. And the world will know us by ours.
May it be so. Amen.
Thank you Ben!