Debunking Joyce Meyer's Power Thoughts - As A Man Thinketh

All right, so let me set this up for you. Well, Joyce Meyer has a television program.

If you haven't seen it, it's, well, just quite the thing to watch.

That's all I can say about it. It's kind of a theological train wreck of the worst magnitude.

And the reason for this, well, actually, there's multiple reasons, but we could talk about some of the primary reasons.

Number one, Joyce Meyer claims to be a pastor, and the Bible forbids such a thing. There are no such things as female pastrixes.

God's word does not allow for that. But on top of it, she is a word of faith heretic, which means that her theology is truly tainted with some really nasty heresy.

And this is an example from an episode from September entitled Power Thoughts.

Power Thoughts. And see if you can make heads or tails of this teaching, at least biblically, because what's really missing here is

Bible. And I'll kind of cue you in as to what she's about to do. She's going to be teaching to a large audience, and she's not going to open up her

Bible. She's going to be opening her book entitled Power Thoughts.

So this is a large venue. She's got quite the crowd going on here, and she's going to teach us not the

Bible, but her book. Listen in. How many of you have read Power Thoughts, the book

Power Thoughts? No, I haven't. Okay. And after hearing this episode of your television program,

I wouldn't wish that my worst enemy would read it. Well, I hope you don't mind this, but I'm going to teach out of this book.

Yeah, rather than the Bible. Mm -hmm. That should cue you in on a few things here.

Beware of Christian pastors, pastorages, teachers, and stuff like that, who get up and open up their book to teach you from their book.

The job of a pastor is not to teach you from their book. The job of a pastor is to teach you from God's book.

Not their book, God's book. It's a big difference. This weekend, and even though you've read the book,

I can guarantee you that I'll say things that are not in the book, and you're going to get some different things out of it.

Oh, what a bonus. Extra bonus heresy on top of it. That sounds great. I believe that this is one of the most important things that we can teach people that they're -

Oh, I'm sure you do. Yes. I mean, how convenient. You think that whatever's taught in Power Thoughts is one of the most important things that we could teach people.

Hmm. You're not biased or anything. It's not like you're making royalties from the sale of every one of those books, are you?

Thoughts are extremely powerful. And not only that their thoughts are powerful, but your thoughts actually turn into your life in the future.

Mm -hmm. My thoughts turn into my life in the future. Hmm. Law of attraction here.

I'm sure we've heard the saying, well, it's all in your mind. Well, to be honest, a lot of our successes, our victories are all in our mind.

That's where they start. Yeah. You got some Bible passages that say this in context?

You can think yourself into a mess. Really? Think my way into a mess. Okay. You can think yourself into a place of victory.

Oh, so I can think my way into victory. Who knew? It's like chess. One of the reasons why people buy so many resources in the mind is because it's one of the hardest areas in our life to get under control and to keep under control.

I actually believe that we will daily have to choose to not think wrong things and to think right things.

And it's something that you have to do on purpose. You can't just think. Yeah. You got to think those right things so that, you know, you can create an extraordinary, great future for yourself.

It's going to just happen. You don't get it just by praying. It's something that you have to do on purpose.

By the way, do you know who used to work for Joyce Meyer? David Crank of Faith Church, St.

Louis. Yeah. He used to work for her. That's not a surprise, is it? Mind is the battlefield.

It's the area where Satan attacks us. If he can get us to believe lies, then we are deceived.

And deception is terrible because you're believing something that's not true, but it becomes your reality.

Now, let me, I want to make that. I agree. Satan's a liar, but what kind of lies are you talking about here?

Clear to you. There are people here that are deceived. There are people watching by TV that are deceived.

I agree with you there. I believe there's a lot of people there watching you and listening to who are deceived.

Any of the people there present thinking that you're actually teaching something that's taught in God's word, they are deceived.

In fact, probably the majority of the people sitting there in that audience, they're deceived. I agree with you, Joyce. You may be a

Christian. You may have been in church for 20 years, but there may be areas in your life where you're deceived.

For example, I'll just give you one example from my life. I was abused in my childhood by my dad sexually in many other ways.

And so I believe the lie that Satan told me that I would always have a second rate life.

Boy, yeah. Oh, that's terrible. I mean, can you believe

Satan would tell you you would have a second rate life? Wow, man. I mean, you know,

Satan is apparently given up on like, you know, the important stuff, like trying to deceive you about who Jesus is and what

Jesus has done, who God is and what he's done. Now he has you believing things like, oh, you're going to have a second rate life.

No, that's a satanic lie from the pit of hell. Uh -huh. Yeah. I believe that I would always have not as good a life as I could have had.

That I was broken. I had been messed up.

I was damaged merchandise now and that probably no man would ever want me.

And, and if I ever did get married, when they found out what had happened to me, then they wouldn't want me anymore.

And so even though that's not true at all, according to the word of God, and we can see the life that God has given me now, one that is far superior to anything.

Oh yeah. You're the ultimate example. I on television, uh, you can afford plastic surgery.

Um, yeah, yeah. See you're a living proof. Uh -huh. Ever imagine

I had to let God change my thinking before any of that would take place.

You got to learn how to think right before you can live right. So my problem is just stinking thinking.

Uh -huh. Notice that this is very much akin to the false doctrine taught by Joel Osteen, Oprah, Steven Furtick, and others.

God has got a good plan for your life, but if you don't believe it, God's not going to be able to do it.

You can't. Oh yeah. What a lame God. What an absolutely inept, completely powerless, like impotent

God that is. I mean, there's God up in heaven. You know, he wants to help you so bad, but he can't.

Yeah. He's completely powerless because you just don't have good thinking.

No, he there's nothing he could do about it until you are willing to engage in power thoughts.

Oh, poor God. He, he's just up there. Yeah. Let me pull out my old Holy Spirit, uh, impersonation.

Hi, this is the Holy Spirit. And I just want to let you know that I really wanted to help you, but you gotta understand my hands are tied and there's not much

I can do to help you. If, if you're not willing to engage in power thoughts, if you're going to believe that devil, and you know, when he tells you things like, yeah, you're going to have a second rate life.

Oh, please don't believe him. I really want to help you, but I'm powerless until you come to the conclusion that I really have a good plan for you.

Um, but I'm powerless to give it to you until you like, um, think powerful thoughts about yourself and, and things like that.

So please give me a shot, please, please. I really want to help you, but I can't,

I can't until you, until you have some power thoughts. So just get those power thoughts going.

And it'd be like tagging me on the hand and saying, you go, Holy Spirit, you can help me now.

And let's see, once you do that, then I'm released to be able to help you. But I, you know, I'm again, my hands are,

I can't do anything until you do that. Uh -huh. I think it's for somebody else.

You have to believe and understand that it's for you. Proverbs 23 seven says, as a man thinks in his heart, so is he.

Yeah. Out of context, you know, I got to do this. Proverbs 23 seven.

When you hear somebody quote it out of context, that's almost like a dead giveaway. That is like a dead giveaway that what you are hearing is, uh, the word of faith heresy.

Okay. Let's, let's go back and take a look at that from a good translation and put it into context.

Again, it's Proverbs chapter 23, verse seven, which you will notice if you, uh, if you were paying attention to the grammar in the

Bible, verse seven begins with the word for, okay.

And you'll notice that the verse before it ends with a comma, which means verse seven begins in the middle of a sentence that, and that sentence begins in verse six.

Okay. So let's take a look at what it says. When we look at this in context, do not eat the bread of a man who is stingy.

Do not desire his delicacies for he is like one who is inwardly calculating eat and drink.

He says to you, but his heart is not with you. You going, wait a second,

Chris, that doesn't sound anything like what Joyce Meyer is trying to make it say, right?

Because what Joyce Meyer has done here is she decided to quote this out of context using the

King James. Okay. And here's what it says in the King James for as he thinketh in his heart, so is he, but see, that's the only part that she quoted.

Let me read it to you in context from the King James and you'll see what's going on here. Okay. Eat thou not the bread of him that hath an evil eye, neither desire thou his dainty meats for as he thinketh in his heart.

So is he eat and drink sayeth he to thee, but his heart is not with thee.

So what's going on in Proverbs chapter 23 verse seven is not some principle about you learning how to think power thoughts far from it.

What this passage is really talking about is beware of a stingy person because stingy people, even though on the outside, they will tell you something like,

Hey, feel free to eat anything you like in my house. If that person is stingy and greedy, they don't mean it.

So when you open up their fridge and start eating their food, they're going to be really mad at you because they don't actually say what they are thinking.

And so the way you can tell is what a person's really like is what's in their heart.

And you have to get to know them a little bit better. That's what's going on in Proverbs chapter 23.

So whenever somebody quotes Proverbs 23 verse seven out of context, as if it's a full and complete thought, that's a dead giveaway that they believe the prosperity, word of faith, heresy, and they're twisting

God's word. Let me back this up so that you can hear her, you know, misuse this verse. And now that you know what it says in context, it makes it all that much more deplorable what she's doing here.

You have to believe and understand that it's for you. Proverbs 23 seven says, the man thinks in his heart.

So is he? Well, I like to say where the mind goes, the man follows.

Uh -huh. Okay. Yeah. I'm glad you like to say that.

Hershey, Pennsylvania this weekend. If you came here thinking about chocolate, you will get it before you leave.

Now that's just the way it is. We become what we think.

The way you talk to yourself, self -talk, and we all have it.

The way you talk to yourself is one of the most important things in your life.

So if you follow this teaching, what's the focus of your mind at this point?

What are you meditating on? Who are you thinking about constantly then if you buy into this teaching?

Answer, you're constantly thinking about yourself and your self -talk. You're not thinking about Christ. You're not thinking about God.

You're not thinking about Jesus. You're not thinking about what the Bible says in context. No, no, no, no. The focus of your mind is all about, oh, what am

I saying about myself internally? What's my self -talk? This turns you back on yourself.

As you can never get beyond what you think. Hogwash, baloney.

There isn't a passage that says that. That's not even true in real life. Especially what you think of yourself, you can never get beyond.

You can never be greater than what you think of yourself. Thinking prepares us for action.

If you think about what somebody has done to you long enough, the next time you see them, you are going to show anger.

You're going to say something that maybe you shouldn't say. You're going to behave in a way that would not be appropriate to behave.

We have to learn, and I don't want you to miss this. This is one of the important things in this book, which, by the way, is available for you this weekend.

We have stacks and stacks of them because I want everybody to go home with one for a fee.

You say, well, why should I buy it if you're going to preach out of it? Because to think that you can hear something once and you've got it, or to think that you can read something once and you've got it, is one of the biggest mistakes that we make.

Right, so that's the reason why you need to buy her book. Yeah, because you don't want to make that mistake. Just because you heard her preach on it doesn't mean you're going to get it.

You got to get her book and read it. We think too highly of ourselves, and it takes goings over and over and over and over something to retrain our mind, or as the

Bible says, to renew our mind. So the way I renew my mind is by reading your book over again.

Got it. I just want to make sure we got that straight. I read something interesting just this morning in another book that I was reading.

He said 90 % of what we do is done out of our subconscious.

It's done out of habit. And this wasn't in the Bible that you were reading that. What was it?

That once something is in your subconscious, you can never get it out, but you can dilute it.

Hmm, okay, and how do I dilute it? With water? So it's like if you have a poisonous stagnant pool of water, which is what some of our minds was like before God got into our life and started trying to teach us how to think right.

How many of you'd say that's right? Your mind was like a stagnant pool of dirty water. I mean suspicious and wrong imaginations and wicked thoughts and anger and greed.

You mean all the stuff that happens to people who are born dead in trespasses and sins, born with a condition of sin, right?

You know, distrust and all these things. So it's like a stagnant stinking pool of water. But what you can do is you can pour chlorine into that water and you put enough of it in there and you can purify it to the point where it could actually be drinkable.

Well, I'm sure it won't taste good. Okay, so all

I need is some spiritual chlorine. Where do I get that? It's the same way with your mind.

Those thoughts may always be there somewhere in your subconscious, but you can put so much of the Word of God in you.

Yeah, if that's the important thing, don't you think that you should be teaching the Word of God? Not that you're supposed to be, but I mean if this is really all about the

Word of God, don't you think you should be teaching it already? I mean like the first time out of the shoot you had opportunity to quote

God's Word. You misquoted it, twisted it, and made it teach something it doesn't teach. So yeah,

I agree we probably should have our minds filled with the Word of God. That's a very good thing to do. I just don't think that you're going to help me achieve that objective.

I think if anything you're going to falsely teach me God's Word and have me focus on myself rather than what

God's Word really teaches in context. You get what I'm saying? I mean for heaven's

I mean if the Word of Faith heresy was really Christianity, then how come none of the church fathers taught it? You know what I'm saying?

And to such a degree that all that old stuff will never come up because the first thing that's going to come up in you is the truth of God's Word.

Amen? So we have to learn how to think on purpose.

Yeah, um okay. This is one of the fines in my life because I had no idea that I could do my own thinking.

What? You didn't do your own thinking? I never even thought about where my thinking came from. I went to church for years and years and years and didn't know that the devil would put thoughts in my mind.

And then if I didn't know the Word of God, I wouldn't know how to recognize when he was lying to me. And so therefore I would just, you know,

I just lived according to what I thought. If I woke up in the morning and thought I feel depressed, then I was depressed all day.

If you know, I got. Oh yeah, that's wow. Terrible that your church would let you do that.

Angry at Dave, I didn't have any ability to control my own thoughts and be rational and logical according to the

Word of God. I would just spend the next two or three days angry until you know. How awful that your church lets you do that.

Another new thought came and I found somebody else to be angry at. And it was such an amazing thing for me when

I realized that everything in my head was not something from me.

It was not something from my circumstances. Much of it was just Satan dumping stuff into my brain because yeah, so you're a you're a victim of satanic data dump into your brain.

Who knew? I mean, yeah, I mean, you wake up and you're feeling depressed. That's Satan causing you to feel depressed and has nothing to do with you.

What you are just a morally neutral person going about your everyday business and Satan want to come.

He wants to just take you captive and pour into your mind the toxins of stinking thinking.

Oh man, how on earth is this woman the multimillionaire that she is?

I mean, why is it that anybody thinks that this is biblical Christianity and what she's teaching is true?

It's just absurd. And it's really easy to demonstrate that this isn't biblical teaching.

Number one, she ain't teaching from the Bible. And number two, nine times out of 10 when she's quoting the Bible, she's doing it out of context and making it say stuff that don't say.

And the thing that should be tipping you off to the fact that that's what you should be expecting from her is the fact that she pawns herself off as well a

Christian pastor when the Bible clearly says that women are not to be such things.

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Christian. We'll be right back. Sermon review on the other side of the break. First sermon that we've reviewed based on the sound of music.

We'll be right back. No itching ears are scratched here.