Bethel Church Doesn’t Understand Forgiveness AT ALL!

Fight For Truth

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Hey guys, Colin here, and welcome back to the channel where the Bible and critical thinking meet to give you real

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Christian commentary about the things that matter. In today's video, we're going to watch a clip where a woman named

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Donna De Silva is speaking to the congregation of Bethel Church. According to their website,

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Donna has been a member at Bethel Church since before Bill Johnson was the pastor there. And yeah, that's a long, long time, folks.

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She's also the founder of Bethel Sozo, which is an inner healing ministry. She also oversees the

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Bethel Transformation Center. Her husband Stephen is the CFO of Bethel Church, officially.

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Needless to say, the views you're about to see are most definitely representative of the Bethel movement.

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The forthcoming clip is one of her speaking to a group of Bethelites, if I may be so bold as to call them that.

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And what she says is utterly baffling. Watch this. I think sometimes we are locked in a prison of unforgiveness because our bodies are mad at us.

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Or we are mad at our bodies. How many bodies are screaming at us all the time?

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It's called pain. It's called sickness. It's called disease.

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So close your eyes. Say Holy Spirit. Is my body mad at me?

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If you heard yes, stand up. Whoa. What a ha ha. I have seen so many people healed when they've been prayed for and prayed for and prayed for when they release this prayer.

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I know it sounds weird, but just do this. When I say body, I ask you to forgive me.

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Whoa. For any way, I have mistreated you.

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For any way, I have let you down, ignored you, and made you scream louder.

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So, there are a few claims made here, and none of them are particularly good. Let's start with her claim that all people should pray, quote,

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Holy Spirit, is my body mad at me? First, I know that in Matthew 19,

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Jesus did say, let the little children come to me, but I'm not sure why that means a room full of grown adults need to start talking like second graders when they pray.

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You could ask, is my body mad at me? But it would be equally as productive to ask in church if you've committed a widow oopsie poopsie.

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I mean, seriously, where in the Bible does it indicate that we should talk like this or pray like this, especially when we're speaking as a congregation in church?

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It's nonsense. In fact, it's seriously irreverent. Look at how Jesus taught us to pray in the

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Lord's prayer given in Matthew 6, quote, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

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Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we have also forgiven our debtors and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, end quote.

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This is presented in a very different style, a very different way from a very different framework than when

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Donna De Silva says, Holy Spirit, is my body mad at me? Again, this is unbiblical.

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It's irreverent and really spiritually useless. And I don't say any of this to demean Donna. I'm just calling this out because it needs to be called out.

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This is dangerously false. Hebrews 12, 28 says, quote, Let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe for our

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God is a consuming fire, end quote. You see, there's a certain level of reverence we ought to approach

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God with, a holy and reverent posture that he deserves. And that kind of reverence is not well reflected by leading a room full of adults in a prayer that sounds more like the pages of Dr.

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Seuss than the pages of Holy Scripture. Does this mean, though, that children cannot approach God in a childlike way when they pray?

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No, that's obviously not what I'm saying. Children can and should act like children.

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That's what they do. But when it comes to the weightier matter of leading an entire congregation in prayer, you need to speak with the vocabulary that God gave you as an adult and from a mature framework.

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Then she says, quote, If you heard, yes, please stand up, end quote. Let me offer you a strong statement.

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It's very definitive. Not one of those people who stood up did so because they actually heard the

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Holy Spirit say yes to them. I know it's quite controversial. How can I say this with such confidence? Well, because the

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Word of God indicates this clearly. In John 14, 26, Jesus says, quote, But the helper, the

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Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.

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End quote. The ministry of the Holy Spirit will not contradict the ministry of Christ. Why? Because they are fully united.

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Christ never taught us to pray this way, nor did he ever indicate that our physical bodies are autonomous and sentient beings that can be mad at us and that we need to apologize to them.

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So because this prayer contradicts the teaching of Christ and the truth of His Word, the Spirit is not going to tell anyone in that room to stand up and affirm that prayer.

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It's just not going to happen. So anyone who stood up is lying. They're not telling the truth.

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They were not spoken to by the Holy Spirit, but they're declaring by standing up that they were.

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In fact, this woman speaking is breaking the command of First Timothy 2, 12, which, by the way, is a text that the

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Holy Spirit himself inspired, just like the rest of God's Word. End quote. And that says, quote, I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man.

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End quote. You see, every pastor in the New Testament was a man, and women were directly forbidden, as they are now, to teach and exercise ministerial authority over men.

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This is the way God has created His church. His church, His rules, not ours. The Spirit of God would not then cause anyone to say yes and amen to this woman's prayer because she is actively contradicting the

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Spirit of God while she's speaking on that stage. In short, let me say it again and very clearly.

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Not a single person in that room heard the Holy Spirit say yes, and everyone who stood up is lying about the

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Holy Spirit. And of course, this is all happening at Bethel Church constantly, and they don't seem to have a problem with it at all because they bought into this completely, hook, line, and sinker.

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After this, though, Donna De Silva goes on saying, quote, I've seen many people healed when they've been prayed for and prayed for and prayed for when they release this prayer.

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End quote. Again, where does the Bible say this? Where do we see in Scripture that we can release prayers to help our bodies stop being so angry at us?

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Where does it say that we can be sick or in pain because our bodies are mad at us? The answer is nowhere.

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The Bible makes it very clear who gets to decide which people are sick, for how long they are sick, and which people are healthy.

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It's God. He Himself says in Exodus 4 .11, quote, Who has made man's mouth, and pay attention to this, who makes him mute, or deaf, or seeing, or blind?

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Is it not I, the Lord? End quote. The Lord is sovereignly in control of all sickness and all disability.

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Our bodies do not have the authority to punish us because they're mad at us. What Donna De Silva is presenting here, then, is a strange, mystical teaching that will not be found anywhere in the

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Bible. The idea that your body can be mad at you and make you ill or hurt is wrong, and the idea that you can release a magical prayer to stop your body from being mad at you is even more wrong.

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This prayer, promoted by Bethel Church, is foreign to Christianity. It's not Christian teaching.

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In fact, it is false teaching about the nature of man, the nature of prayer, and the nature of healing. But the strangest comment is saved for the end, when

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Donna De Silva tells the congregation to say, quote, Body, I ask you to forgive me for any way

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I have mistreated you, ignored you, or made you scream louder. End quote.

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Now I want to offer a bit of practical advice. I'm not a psychologist, folks. I don't have a PhD in anything, but if your body is audibly screaming at you and it's getting louder, you need to see a psychiatrist immediately, and you might be interested in finding the nearest mental institution.

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And if you think that joke is taking what she said out of context, I will remind you that she literally believes that your body has the ability to forgive you, and that you can talk to your body to make it do that.

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But all jokes aside, the problem here is that she is suggesting that your body has the ability to forgive you.

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And again, I need to make the point, your body is not a moral agent. You operate your body as the moral agent, not the other way around.

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It does not have a will that goes against your will. Your body cannot forgive you because your body, while it was wonderfully designed by God, cannot think or talk or act by itself without being attached to a living heart, soul, and mind.

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This personification of the body done by Bethel Church's speaker here is seriously wrong then.

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It's a complete misunderstanding about what forgiveness actually is and who can grant it. Biblically, we know two things about the moral agency of forgiveness.

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Number one, God can forgive people. What a beautiful truth. 1 John 1 9 says, quote, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

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End quote. God can forgive us, and indeed he does forgive us through the blood of his perfect son,

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Jesus. That's amazing. Number two, we know that people can forgive us when we sin against them.

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Ephesians 4 32 says, quote, be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another as God in Christ forgave you.

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End quote. So because Christians are forgiven by the Lord, we must forgive each other's sins in the church.

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God can forgive people, people can forgive people, but bodies do not forgive people because bodies are not in and of themselves moral agents.

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As we've covered, if you are in the kitchen cutting tomatoes, for instance, and you accidentally slice your hand, you could sit there and say, hand, please forgive me, please over and over again till you're blue in the face.

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But your hand is never going to respond because it can't talk because it's a hand.

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But if it does happen to respond, again, please see the psychiatrist that I mentioned earlier. But I digress.

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The reason for the jokes here is because I'm illustrating the silliness of the actual argument being made.

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I want to make it clear, though, that there is a category for sinning against one's body as well. First Corinthians 6 18 does say, quote, flee from sexual immorality.

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Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body, end quote.

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So yes, we can sin against our bodies, and that's a serious ethical problem to the point that we have to flee from this kind of sin.

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But does this text suggest that our bodies can forgive us for the sin we commit against them?

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Nope. There's not one shred of biblical evidence that would lead us to that conclusion, as we've already covered.

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The truth is, this whole thing is being made up by Bethel Church and Donna De Silva.

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This entire doctrine is just a little theory of theirs. It's not real. It's not in Scripture. Plain and simple.

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So in conclusion, do not listen to the teaching of Bethel Church. They are deceptive, they're dangerous, and they do not rightly preach

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God's Word. If you listen to them and believe what they say, you will be deceived. And remember that apart from the grace of God, we would all think falsely about God, more than any of us would care to admit.

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The fact is, we are all wretched sinners in need of God's grace and in need of His enlightenment.

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So please pray for Bethel Church that they would stop teaching this nonsense, and that's what it is, and that they would turn to the truth of God's Word.

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