7 Bible Verses about Apostasy, How To Avoid

Bad characters and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving others and deceived themselves; but hold you to what you have been taught, hold to your convictions, remember who your teachers were, remember you have known from childhood the sacred writings that can impart saving wisdom by faith in Christ Jesus.read more.
All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for amendment, and for moral discipline, to make the man of God proficient and equip him for good work of every kind.

intelligence with self-control, self-control with stedfastness, stedfastness with piety, piety with brotherliness, brotherliness with Christian love. For as these qualities exist and increase with you, they render you active and fruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ;read more.
whereas he who has not these by him is blind, shortsighted, oblivious that he has been cleansed from his erstwhile sins. So be the more eager, brothers, to ratify your calling and election, for as you practise these qualities you will never make a slip; you will thus be richly furnished with the right of entry into the eternal realm of our Lord and saviour Jesus Christ.

I know that when I am gone, fierce wolves will get in among you, and they will not spare the flock; yes. and men of your own number will arise with perversions of the truth to draw the disciples after them. So be on the alert, remember how for three whole years I never ceased night and day to watch over each one of you with tears.

Do not believe every spirit, beloved, but test the spirits to see if they come from God; for many false prophets have emerged in the world. You can recognize the Spirit of God by this: every spirit which confesses Jesus as the Christ incarnate comes from God, and every spirit which does not confess Jesus [incarnate] does not come from God. This latter is the spirit of antichrist; you were told it was coming, and here it is already in the world.read more.
My dear children, you belong to God, and you have conquered all such, for He who is within you is greater than he who is in the world. They belong to the world, therefore they speak as inspired by the world, and the world listens to them: we belong to God ??he who knows God listens to us, he who does not belong to God does not listen to us. This is how we recognize the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

till we should all attain the unity of the faith and knowledge of God's Son, reaching maturity, reaching the full measure of development which belongs to the fulness of Christ ??14 instead of remaining immature, blown from our course and swayed by every passing wind of doctrine, by the adroitness of men who are dexterous in devising error; we are to hold by the truth, and by our love to grow up wholly into Him. For He, Christ, is the head, and under him, as the entire Body is welded together and compacted by every joint with which it is supplied, the due activity of each part enables the Body to grow and build itself up in love.

To conclude. Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his might; put on God's armour so as to be able to stand against the stratagems of the devil. For we have to struggle, not with blood and flesh but with the angelic Rulers, the angelic Authorities, the potentates of the dark present, the spirit-forces of evil in the heavenly sphere.read more.
So take God's armour, that you may be able to make a stand upon the evil day and hold your ground by overcoming all the foe. Hold your ground, tighten the belt of truth about your loins, wear integrity as your coat of mail, and have your feet shod with the stability of the gospel of peace; above all, take faith as your shield, to enable you to quench all the fire-tipped darts flung by the evil one, put on salvation as your helmet, and take the Spirit as your sword (that is, the word of God), praying at all times in the Spirit with all manner of prayer and entreaty ??be alive to that, attend to it unceasingly, interceding on behalf of all the saints and on my behalf also, that I may be allowed to speak and open my lips in order to expound fully and freely that open secret of the gospel for the sake of which I am in custody as its envoy. Pray that I may have freedom to declare it as I should.

I adjure you to preach the word; keep at it in season and out of season, refuting, checking, and exhorting men; never lose patience with them, and never give up your teaching,