We Have Been Taught Not to Discern - Part 2 — Andrew Strom

The Secularization of Wales and the Western World

On the big bridge into Wales, they think, wow, I'm in Wales, you know, land of revivals. No, I want to say to you, it ain't no land of revivals. By the time I had finished my time there, I realised, hey, man, this is just New Zealand.

This is just Australia. This is just Europe. They just speak a bit different. That's it. They're a secular nation. They've gone down that road where God has been slowly pushed back and back and back and the children stopped going to church years ago.

There's no Sunday schools left. There's no youth groups left. Hardly at all. It's just... It's just your typical... Most of the world is like that. The whole Western world is like that. America is a shining beacon.

America's History of Revival and Spiritual Crossroads

Why is that? Because in the 1950s, America was having revival. Very powerful healing revivals all over the States. And in the early 70s, there was a refreshing movement came through. The charismatic movement and the Jesus movement.

And the hippies were hitting the streets and preaching Jesus on the streets and baptising people in the sea. And we think, oh, yeah, that's just kind of long hair revolution. I tell you, that was a really important movement.

Really important. So America has, even despite this terrible falling away, managed to keep its life going. And now we reach the time, here we are in 2009, where we're really on the danger point. We're on that crossroads point where anything could happen.

Prayer and the Right Kind of Preaching

And if there's not enough prayer and enough preaching of the right kind, I want to tell you, we're just digging a hole for ourselves, just like Wales did. Just like Wales did. And our churches will be empty.

Americans can't imagine what it's like to live in a place where there are gigantic churches all through the land and they're all virtually empty. All you've got to do is visit Europe. Just go visit Europe and you'll see your future if you're not careful.

God sent me here five years ago, six years ago, saying, this is America's future unless actions are taken. What are the actions we need to take? You know, it's not rioting on the streets, it's not protesting on the streets.

It's fairly simple what God looks for. He looks for prayer and he looks for the right kind of preachers. And he has terrible difficulty finding both those things. Because you know what we do with our preachers today in the West?

The Compromise of Lukewarm Preachers

We pay them to be lukewarm. We pay them not to preach about sin. We say, I tell you what, you know, we've got a little deal going. The preachers are totally aware of this. They're totally aware that if they don't touch certain subjects, they'll get bigger offerings.

If they preach about money, they'll get bigger offerings. If they tell everybody they're going to be blessed. If they can somehow from somewhere magically get the ability to tap people on the head and they fall over, oh, wow, that's worth a million bucks, isn't it?

Discernment and Counterfeit Spiritual Power

Now, I'm a Pentecostal charismatic by background and I want to tell you, I'm appalled by a lot of what I've seen and what I see in the churches. I believe a lot of it is really, really over the borderline.

Over the borderline. I believe guys are operating in all kinds of spirits, they know not what. In Nigeria, most of the guys, there's a lot of preachers, they know, they can tell you preachers in their own country who are operating in all kinds of spirits.

Because it used to be commonplace, now all you do is you change Jesus into a few words and you can still operate in power and make a lot of money. Why wouldn't that thing happen here? The discernment's all gone.

People don't sit in the pews and really know their scripture or know their God that well anymore. People rely on the preachers so much to tell them every little thing, they're not studying it out for themselves, their heart is not in the right place, there's too much comfort.

Spiritual Apathy and the Purpose of Crisis

Why has God sent a recession? Do you know what I praise God for? You know, two years ago, when I was leaving America, I was leaving America in a state of just terrible sadness because I felt like my message was a total mismatch for the country.

I felt like I was coming, bringing a very serious message, but it was almost like there was too much euphoria around us, too much kind of hype and glitz and all of this for anybody to want to hear it.

I want to tell you what God is doing in this country and it's really an important thing. Do you know how much God loves America? Do you know how much he doesn't want to lose his one remaining revival country in the West?

Do you know how much he doesn't? He's sending something that is going to grind that comfortable apathy out. That's what he's doing. And we say, oh, you know, it's terrible. I feel very, very sad for people who have lost their jobs and are in the process of losing their house, but I want to tell you, from a point of view of the spiritual, Jesus is actively doing something in the country.

He's saying, right, I'm getting my filing system out and my razor sharp blades and I'm going to start hacking off all the corners that I don't like. And we're going to really get down to some business here because these guys are finally going to get out of their euphoria mode.

The Lakeland Movement and the Loss of Discernment

See, Lakeland to me, here's what Lakeland was to me. Lakeland was the last bit of froth on top of an already frothy 20 years. That's how I see Lakeland. Like, even a blind man could see something wrong with Lakeland.

You go and ask your average non-Christian, they've watched five minutes of Lakeland, they say, you know what, there's something really wrong with that guy. I mean, are you guys blind? You know, just have a look at what he's doing.

It's sort of like, wham, bam, kind of, you know, you know. I mean, he doesn't even sound like, you know, there's so much obviously wrong there. But us Christians, you know how we kill our discernment?

“Touch Not the Lord’s Anointed” and “Judge Not”

Here's how we do it. Everybody says these words to us, touch not the Lord's anointed, that's all they've got to say to us. Judge not. What do they mean when they're saying that to us? They're saying, discern not.

They're saying, discern not. They're saying, you're not allowed to speak about these things. You better be very, very careful. And then they say, ah, but it's said to offend our minds. That's the other thing they start saying.

It's said to offend our minds. So therefore, because it's offending your mind, that's why you're offended. And I want to say to you, no, I'm offended because the Spirit of God inside of me says it's off.

It looks off, it sounds off, in every way it seems off. The Spirit of God is witnessing to me, it's off. I think it's off. What do you think? It's off. We shouldn't need the guy to get into, you know, some relationship with some woman and his marriage fall apart for us to think, oh, after all it was off, goodness, how about that?

We shouldn't have needed that to happen. We should have said straight off, yeah, I think the used car salesman, the guy who's not a Christian down the road, who thinks it's just unbelievable, I think he's right.

We should have just said, you know, that guy's got more discernment than we us Christians. We kill all our discernment in the church. Did you know that? Squash it down, we squash it down. There is a famine of the hearing of the word of the Lord in this place.

The Famine of the Word and the Rise of Fables

And that is a kind of a judgment, did you know that? You know, if God is giving people over to a lie that they so want, one of the first things that disappears is the word of the Lord starts disappearing out of the land and it gets replaced with what?

Fables. Fables. Fables. Junk Christianity, junk preaching, preaching that's not preaching on sin or righteousness or judgment, which all the prophets and apostles preached. No, no popular messages from these guys.

Jesus, John the Baptist, and Offensive Preaching

They were like John the Baptist. If you look at Jesus' words, if we get rid of the pansy kind of image that we have of Jesus, where he's just like a flower child kind of guy, you know, and he's just going, oh, oh.

We get rid of this long haired, blue eyed, you know, rather pale looking, kind of, you know, slightly feminine, sorry ladies, Jesus, and we start looking at what he's saying. He's just continuing the message of John the Baptist.

He's virtually as offensive, you know, he starts preaching and what do they want to do? They take him to throw him off a cliff. I don't know the last preacher that you saw do that. I haven't seen many preachers that they threatened immediately as soon as he starts preaching, right, these guys, we're going to kill them.

Sunday morning, no, you haven't seen that? John chapter six. Jesus in a sense here is representing a famine of the hearing of the word of the Lord in a kind of parable type of thing. Let's have a look at it.

Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand in John 6

This is the feeding of the 5 ,000. I just want to bring out a point out of this. John six verse five. When Jesus lifted up his eyes and saw a great company coming to him, he said to Philip, where shall we buy bread that these may eat?

And this he said to prove him for he himself knew what he would do. Philip answered him, 200 penny worth of bread is not sufficient for them, that every one of them may take a little. One of his disciples, Andrew, Simon Peter's brother said to him, there's a lag here which has five barley loaves and two small fish, but what are they among so many?