Steven Bancarz & New Age | Full Episode

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That's Joy, the girl right there. Hello. And that's Luke, the bear. We have a special guest in the studio. His name is Steven Bancars.

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That's right. And he has a ministry called Reasons for Jesus. That's right. There you go. See, I got that right, but I don't know the name of our own ministry.

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That's right. Well, we have a very interesting show today. Thank you for joining us. If you guys are watching this, you guys can get tons of content on this website over here.

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So with all of that and all that content, wide spectrum of issues, we are going to do an interesting show today on the

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New Age, which actually encompasses a whole ton of stuff. Yeah, it's just an umbrella term.

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It really is an umbrella term. Hinduism, Buddhism, occult philosophy, meditation, yoga, crystals, tarot cards, and all this stuff is kind of lumped under the umbrella of the

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New Age movement. That's right. It's making a really big push, especially in the West right now.

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That's right, and we live in a day and age where people are interested in spiritual things, but they don't want to go to God, so they go elsewhere, and it's not like it's a new thing.

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It's really an old thing. Deuteronomy 18 is actually an important passage related to this in terms of the practices.

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So my point is laying a foundation here for our discussion. I want to hear from you and sort of give us your story. This battle with the

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New Age and these practices is very, very old. It's ancient, and God addresses it in Deuteronomy 18.

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Issues like mediums, necromancers, charmers, those who interpret omens, practice divination.

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This is something that's as old as dirt, and so we're going to address it.

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So, Steve, tell us about your story because it's interesting. Yeah, so I was born and raised in a

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Christian household, homeschooled by a Christian mother under a Christian curriculum.

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Went to a Christian private school growing up. I was raised with the most biblical of a worldview possible, like six -day literal creationism.

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It's all I knew growing up, in and out of church. And when I got into high school,

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I was still really into the Christian worldview. I was into young earth creationism.

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Actually, Dr. Kent Hovind, I was into his work a lot in grade nine. And the problem was when

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I started to get into other types of research, in particular when I was in grade 11, research involving aliens,

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UFO stories, alien abductions, and so forth, I became obsessed with it.

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It was really interesting to me. It was mysterious and sort of, you know, magical. And it started to call into question six -day creationism and the biblical worldview, the exclusivity of Christ.

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For example, something that I was struggling with was if the universe is teeming with life, if there's populated planets all over our universe, did

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Christ have to go to every single planet and die for their sins as well? Does each planet have their own version of the

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Bible? And on which day did God say, let there be aliens? Like, I just couldn't reconcile it with the biblical worldview.

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And when you get into ufology, a lot of people who are pushing this, they're also pushing

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New Age theology alongside it. It's a package deal. It's a package deal, especially when you get into what's called contact material, where people believe that aliens have given them material, in particular in the form of channeling.

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So people basically go into a trance state of consciousness and connect with what they believe are aliens, are extraterrestrial beings, who then speak through them.

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It's called automatic writing if they're writing it down. And I started to get into some channeled material. And it's kind of funny that it's so explicitly anti -Christ.

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That was a red flag for me. But even then, there seemed to be a lot of evidence to suggest, okay, something's going on here.

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People are making contact. People are having abduction experiences. A lot of it is hocus -pocus, but if even one experience is true, if even one

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UFO sighting is real, then we have to incorporate this into the Christian worldview. And I simply couldn't.

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And a main program that did this for me on the History Channel was called Ancient Aliens. It's got that guy with the crazy hair or whatever.

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It's become a meme, an international meme. Yeah, exactly. And on that program, they present something called ancient astronaut theory, which is absolutely huge in the

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New Age. It's a staple. It's the idea that ancient cultures around the world were visited in the past by extraterrestrial beings that they mistook for being supernatural gods.

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And so you have stories of gods coming down from the sky and chariots of fire. Stories like Nibiru, Planet X.

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Stuff like that. That would be more so of a New Ager's interpretation of trying to identify which planets they came from thousands of years later.

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But the ancient cultures themselves, ironically, never believed that they came from a planet. There's not a single ancient text you can find where they're saying, yes, these aliens came from this planet or that planet.

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They just simply didn't believe that. We'll get into that a little bit more later maybe. But there seemed to be some evidence in the ancient world that these people were receiving knowledge and tools and information that seemed to come from a source outside of themselves.

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And that, to me, it seemed to be best explained at the time as maybe they really are aliens that were visiting us.

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That they mistook as being gods in flying shields or in the Book of Ezekiel, the brass -like beings flying down within...

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Popular text with people who are into this. That's right. Wheels within wheels and so forth. And they always refer to the

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Book of Enoch. That's right. And the Fall of Angels in Genesis 6. And then

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I was like, oh my gosh, aliens are real. And I started to get more into different types of New Age material,

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New Age theology. I started to be convinced of religious pluralism, pantheism. Pantheism's a staple in the

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New Age movement. That God is the universe. That he's the substance of reality. And therefore we are ultimately all

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God. Hang on to that thought, guys. We'll be right back. Very interesting, actually. Something I've said for a long time, right?

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Everyone who's interested and fascinated in UFO stuff ends up denying Christ. It sort of goes hand in hand. Be right back, guys.

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So if you're just catching up with us right now, you just tuned in on your television.

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We've been talking about the new age, but an interesting entry into it is

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Steve was raised in a Christian home, homeschooled. I'll just ask quickly. Did you go in high school?

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Did you switch from homeschool to public school? In grade seven, I switched to public school. Okay, gotcha. And so he made his way into the new age via the study of UFOs and extraterrestrial life and context stories and those sorts of things, channeling.

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And it's interesting because I'm basically the only believer in my family and I have an older brother who's a half -brother.

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We didn't grow up in the same house, but I'd say maybe about eight, nine years ago or so is when

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I started talking to him. He was really into UFO stuff, and so I started to read the stuff that he was reading because I wanted to minister to him, and I started digging in, and I spent quite a lot of time reading that material and trying to dig into that world view so I could be better equipped to reach him and read

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Sitchin and guys like him. And one of the things that I immediately noticed was this track that goes from this field right into the new age, and it's almost like if you embrace this field, it leads to a denial of Christ's deity,

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Christ's message. It just went hand in hand, and that's the one thing I said is if you go this direction, it's not neutral.

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If you grab hold of this world view, it now removes the need for Jesus' redemption, the

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Word of God as the Word of God. That's right. And so it's really fascinating to hear somebody that genuinely went that course.

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Yeah, I genuinely went that course, and the contact material that I was reading, I was reading something called The Law of One, and it was explicitly denying

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Christ, and it was pushing a sort of more of a panentheistic model whereby humans can sort of move their way up a scale of deification depending on their psycho -spiritual development.

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And that, to me, it seemed to make sense at the time, and they encourage people to practice things that will help elevate them to a higher state of consciousness.

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And something I started practicing was, well, obviously meditation, but lucid dreaming, and in particular, astral projection, like actually leaving my body, and not just dreaming that I'm leaving my body, like my spirit man being outside of my body, being in the same layout of everything.

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And that, to me, I had two experiences like that. Once where I observed real things that were happening in my house that I couldn't have known were happening, like very specific details right down to what was on television at that particular time.

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And that, to me, I thought I was like hacking the matrix. I thought I was really on to something. And I was practicing a lot.

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I was researching a lot. And it reached a point where actually my little brother's friends were so interested in this stuff.

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Like people are really thirsty for the supernatural. They're really, really thirsty, and they don't know that they have that in Christ and in the

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Holy Spirit. And I didn't. I thought it was like a dry religious system. The New Age actually teaches that everything, every kind of belief system is really just a play in consciousness, that we are all consciousness experiencing itself as different personalities to learn about itself.

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And so it doesn't ultimately matter what the content of your mind is. It's just a form that arises in your consciousness, and then it goes back away.

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Is it in a sense sort of like a universal mind? There's a universal mind that is experiencing itself as individual persons.

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And so we're just kind of playing this role out so that way the universe can learn through our experience.

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It's interesting too. Are you catching? Do you hear it? So it's interesting how the New Age, these ancient beliefs sort of morph and turned into different flavors and sort of work their way into other things, practices.

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For example, there's a form of chiropractic care called Corn Specific Technique.

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That's really, it's only, it's new. It's a newcomer. It's since about the year 2000. There's a guy named

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Dr. Corn who created it. But that whole world, he borrowed from the New Age world, and there's the idea of this universal mind.

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And all of our minds can actually leave our bodies and enter into another body to try to do a diagnosis, like to figure out what's wrong in the body.

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And a lot of Christians even impacted by this, they go and do this chiropractic care and don't realize that the practices are dowsing,

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New Age technique of dowsing to get to information. And the idea is that my mind enters your body and figures out information.

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And Christians are duped by this. But it's interesting because it's a New Age belief. Yeah, it is.

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And so basically, I thought that Christianity was in principle irrelevant by virtue of the fact that all religious beliefs and so forth are, you're just trading one set of thoughts for another.

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And so I was convinced that there's just really no need for any kind of faith or belief since we're all just the universe experiencing itself.

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We all return to source eventually anyways. I made a Facebook page to share some of this stuff with people who were asking me questions and so forth as a culmination of my research.

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And the Facebook page grew pretty quickly. I had the largest New Age YouTuber reach out to me and said he liked my

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Facebook page. And we started collaborating, networking with other Facebook pages. And then I had 500 ,000 likes on my page.

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And then I decided that I need to make a website. Give us some of your tips. You can talk after.

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I had 500 ,000 likes on my page. And then I made a website called SpiritScienceMetaphysics .com.

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And at the time, it was top three largest New Age websites in the world as soon as I launched it because of the

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Facebook pages I had access to. It was getting 200 ,000 views a day on it on average, up to three quarters of a million.

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And the articles that seemed to do the best were actually ones pertaining to the afterlife, near -death experiences, reincarnation, and so forth.

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And people were just drinking it up. And I'll share this on here. I haven't shared this publicly on film yet.

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But the income, just people should know, the AdSense revenue was 40 to 50 grand a month. And to me,

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I thought that was divine confirmation from the universe and from God that I was on the right track. And I thought

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I was attracting that into my reality through the law of attraction and that God was blessing me for waking humanity up.

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And so I was neck deep in this stuff. I was fully convinced in my own mind. I was debating my own mom about reincarnation and stuff like this.

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She was scared out of her mind. Probably heartbroken. Yeah, heartbroken. Yeah, to see you go in that direction.

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Yeah, and to me, I truly did believe that there was sufficient evidence for what I was believing.

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And the New Age movement likes to blend in some loose understanding of quantum physics and quantum mechanics into this.

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And what they basically say is that at the heart of nature lies a unified field of consciousness.

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In science, it's called the superstring field or the unified field. And people such as physicists, such as John Hagelin or Amit Goswami, they'll say that field is actually a field of intelligence.

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And so consciousness in this view is actually a fundamental property of the universe, kind of like space, time, and energy.

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And so everything in the universe emanates from this field of universal consciousness in this view.

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And so God is this field, and it kind of spits out particles, and depending on how these particles are vibrating, it gives rise to different protons, neutrons, whatever.

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And I believe that we were emanating out of this field of consciousness. And all of this began with a study of aliens.

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All this began with a study of aliens. I was fully convinced, neck deep. And my website was extremely successful.

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And then after a while, I became a lead author on the spiritscience .net, which was at the time the largest New Age website in the world.

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And this whole time, I was literally, people need to know the fruitlessness of this form of spirituality.

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Talk about that. Yeah, so there are a lot of people in the New Age movement right now, people who've come out of it, who while they're teaching in the

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New Age movement, they're living double lives that are extreme, not only extreme, but just straight up criminal. And they're still teaching people how to evolve their consciousness and elevate their consciousness and wake up and so forth.

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And I was living a double life. I was literally a slave to sin. Not only was

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I evil in my thoughts and heart continuously, I was twisted. My soul was twisted.

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And it did absolutely nothing to fix any of my problems psychologically or emotionally, all this meditation, all of this knowledge and wisdom.

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And people will say, well, you just weren't practicing it enough or practicing it properly. Okay, I can point to you, people who are and people who make their living doing this stuff, who had the same kind of problems that I did.

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And my life was crumbling before me. I was hurting people and my secrets were coming out.

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And I ended up hurting someone that I really cared for. And my whole life, while I was in high school, while I was in the

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New Age movement, it was a life of brokenness, of habitual, uncontrollable sin.

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And I reached a point where I was so weak that I had to start taking the person of Jesus more seriously.

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So in the New Age movement, as you can imagine, we just talked a little bit about New Age theology. But Jesus, in the

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New Age movement, he's someone who became Christ by realizing his inherent divinity.

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He's not someone who came to die for our sins and was born as Christ. He developed his consciousness to reach a state of God consciousness throughout his life.

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Okay, hang on to that thought, guys. Apologia TV. Awesome. Awesome episode. Stay with us, guys.

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Don't forget to share this episode. If you can think of the flinch of their mind, when you throw a ball at somebody, some people jump back and some people reach forward to catch it.

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When they hear an argument that needs to be engaged with, when they see a message that needs to be dealt with, we want people who jump towards it and go after it.

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And that's what our curriculum is about. Welcome back, everybody.

20:20

Here, talking with Stephen Bancar's Reasons for Jesus. Fascinating discussion. Very, very cool stuff.

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Did you do this on Sheologians? Get into all this stuff? Yeah. Well, some of it. Not all of it. Not Disney.

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Another detail we could hear on this show. I want to be a cute, stealing guest. I got this guest for the show and for Sheologians.

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Okay. All right, so. I'm sharing. All right, so. We finished the last segment.

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You were talking about the belief, the New Age belief about Christ. You needed to start taking him more seriously because your life was dwindling.

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That's right. It was imploding. So you're starting to now consider the person of Christ and the

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New Age has a view of Christ that's distorted where he becomes, he realizes his inherent divinity.

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He becomes God. That's right. Okay. That's right. So he doesn't. So this is something that we could also achieve.

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We can also achieve and reach. And they would say it's not so much achieving. It's more so realizing. More like the

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Christ consciousness. Christ consciousness. So the problem is not sin or under development.

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It's just self -ignorance. We just don't know who we are in this view. And we don't know that our ultimate identity is God or is

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Brahman as they would say in Hinduism. That the self is ultimately a self with a capital S. That we are ultimately

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God experiencing our self. Experiencing itself I should say because it's an impersonal force as human beings.

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And so Jesus through reaching these more fundamental levels of consciousness discovered that the kingdom of God was already within him.

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And he was trying to impart this to us. This wisdom. This path of enlightenment so that we could all realize that we are

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Christ too. That we can become Christ too. So Christ is really an it. It's a state of consciousness. It's not a person per se.

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And this is something that Oprah Winfrey believes that she has openly said on her show that she believes

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Jesus came to teach us Christ consciousness. And very very prevalent view. Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle all these people believe this.

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And I believe this. But there was always everyone in the New Age movement has intuitions that they suppress.

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They actively resist and suppress about the person of Jesus. That's why they have to try and explain him away. And create detours around the

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Bible and make excuses like oh well the council of Nicea perverted the canon. And they hid his true teachings.

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Or the early church got it wrong. Even though Nicea had nothing to do with canon. Nothing to do with canon. Had to do with just establishing not establishing but more so the deity of Christ.

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But so basically everybody tries to account for Jesus in their world view. And they never try to take anybody else out of context.

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They never try and say Buddha was a monotheistic Jew. But everybody is going to try and say Jesus was a yogi or a gnostic or a mystic.

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And he's really the most historically established figure from the ancient world. In terms of what he believed and what he taught.

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Radical monotheist. And it reached a point where I had to stop suppressing the truth and unrighteousness really.

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And I reached a point where I was just I was a slave to sin.

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And I was absolutely broken. And I went home and I met with my mom.

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And my mom said a prayer of salvation with me. And that was when I decided okay Jesus I'm going to take you a little bit more seriously for who you actually are.

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I'm going to stop trying to cut corners and twist you into someone you're not. Whoever you are I'm asking you to save me.

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To come into my life. And for the next week or two weeks nothing really changed.

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I didn't have any real revelation from God. I had a little bit of a deterrence away from the New Age movement. But I still had my

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New Age books. My website was still up. And it actually reached a point where I had to confess a whole other round of sins.

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Like a whole other round of deep deep sins. Like scary sins. And when I did that that's when

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I was like I can't do this anymore. And I fell at the feet of Christ. And when

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I was just repenting really. I was on my knees on my face crying out to him. Asking him to forgive me to save me.

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I can't do this anymore. And that's when he overwhelmed me with his presence. And engulfed me with his presence and with his spirit.

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And it not only was around me but it filled me. And it was personal. And the thing that stuck out to me when

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I was in his presence was his lordship over me. Where I stood in relation to him.

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That I was under his feet. That the universe all of nature was under his feet. And that he was king. And that his attention was fully set on me.

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And the simplicity of it. The simplicity of the gospel. I was saying in my head Jesus is

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Lord. Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. It's so simple. How did I miss this? And the Bible says no one says Jesus is

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Lord but by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit was absolutely crushing me.

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And breaking me into submission. And something that stuck out to me was like his presence was so thick.

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Like I've been in church many times. There's only one other time where it's been anywhere close to that. In 50 church services.

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All my prayer life and so forth. It was something different. And it sounded like the wind and the leaves on the trees and the crickets the sounds of nature were recognizing him.

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Like they were recognizing that he was there. And it was crazy. I'll never forget it.

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Okay. So creation was glorifying him.

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Recognizing his Lordship. I don't know if the

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Lord was showing me that that's always happening. Or if they were doing that just because his presence was there.

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But it was crazy and I picked up on that and I was like I'm done. So I went back inside and I was reconsidering everything.

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I mean I had light bulbs going off in my head like crazy. That the Holy Spirit was showing me things in the

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New Age movement that I had kind of skipped past. Patterns that I had overlooked in particular.

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You see the same patterns repeat in every single ancient culture except people of the Bible. They're clearly distinct and sanctified among the other ancient cultures.

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Every single ancient culture that was visited by these so -called angels or sorry, gods from the sky they were practicing human sacrifice.

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They believe that to contact them they had to do drugs, sacrifice human blood and do spiritual ceremonies in order to contact them.

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I was like oh my gosh it's a demonic trap. Everything is carefully crafted, demonic strategy set up to keep people away from what

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I just experienced. Salvation, right? Presence of the Lord and I started to see oh my gosh

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I've been deceived and it took the Holy Spirit for me to see that. People have asked me when did you start to doubt the

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New Age movement? When I came into contact with Jesus that's when I didn't have the revelation.

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The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 4 that the gospels veiled to those who were perishing. Satan's blinded the minds of the unbelievers and it took

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God to take that veil off my eyes and when he did I didn't care about anything except him.

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I quit my job, sold my house, I told people online like Jesus it's real, this is all a deception to keep us away from him.

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Dang. I bet that was a shock to them. That was a shock. Yeah. That was a big shock. Well I want to actually hang on this.

27:46

I want to hear more and it's powerful stuff. I want to hear more and I'd like you to actually help us to know some things to look for and to be aware of the things that Christians can be impacted by and maybe how to reach out to people who are loved ones that are lost in this stuff as well.

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So we're going to have the after show. You guys can get it at ApologiaStudios .com. We're going to extend the discussion there.

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